Pompeo concedes challenges on ISIS and North Korea
UNITED NATIONS — The Islamic State has gained ground in some areas, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acknowledged on Tuesday, despite President Donald Trump’s proclamation that the extremist group had been vanquished.
Pompeo also conceded, in a television interview, having some frustration in dealing with North Korea.
But Pompeo said he believed the administration was finding success with the intensified sanctions against Iran that were set in motion after Trump repudiated the 2015 nuclear agreement with that country.
“We’ve put in place a set of sanctions that have denied the Iranian regime wealth,” Pompeo said in the interview, on “CBS This Morning.” In the administration’s view, he said, “that is working.”
Pompeo spoke ahead of an appearance later Tuesday at a United Nations Security Council meeting on the Middle East, where he sought to portray Iran as the region’s principal wrongdoer. The tensions between the United States and Iran have raised fears of a new armed conflict in the Middle East.
He accused Iran’s top leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, of having “gone allin on a campaign of extortion diplomacy” to frustrate the administration’s intention to bring all Iranian oil purchases to zero, including the Iranian seizure of foreign-flagged oil tankers traversing the Strait of Hormuz last month.
There are expectations that Iran will release one of those vessels, the British tanker Stena Impero, in coming days, following the release over the weekend of an Iranian tanker, the Grace 1, by the British territory of Gibraltar, despite American pressure. The vessel, which has been renamed the Adrian Darya-1 by Iran, has been reported heading to Greece.
Trump’s declarations of success in some other high-profile issues — notably in terminating the Islamic State and ending the menace of North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities — have faced increased skepticism.
Pompeo offered a mixed answer when asked about reports, including a New York Times article, on the revival of the Islamic State in the Middle East, five months after Trump declared that the group’s selfproclaimed caliphate in Syria and Iraq had been defeated.
“It’s complicated,” Pompeo said. “There are certainly places where ISIS is more powerful today than they were three or four years ago. But the caliphate is gone and their capacity to conduct external attacks has been made much more difficult.”
Regarding North Korea’s threats to the United States, which Trump said he had eliminated after having met the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, in Singapore last year, Pompeo also offered a mixed picture.
“We haven’t gotten back to the table as quickly as we would have hoped, but we’ve been pretty clear all along we knew there would be bumps along the way,” he said.