Pompeo Holds News Conference After Demanding UN Reinstate Iran Sanctions

(Aug. 20) Watch live as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gives a news conference at the ground floor entrance at the United Nations in New York, following a meeting with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

The U.S. formally notified the United Nations of its demand that the Security Council reinstate international sanctions against Iran in a controversial move known as “snapback” that U.S. allies have said they oppose.

Secretary of State Michael Pompeo handed the head of the UN Security Council a letter Thursday saying Iran isn’t complying with its obligations under the 2015 nuclear deal “despite extensive efforts and exhaustive diplomacy” by the U.S. and other member states.

Pompeo traveled to New York for the notification, underscoring its significance to the Trump administration. The action sets the administration on a collision course with other world powers who say the U.S. doesn’t have the authority to invoke the snapback provision of the multinational agreement because Trump quit it two years ago.

“Mark it down, Iran will never have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said at a White House news conference on Wednesday. “We paid a fortune for a failed concept, a failed policy that would have made it impossible to have peace in the Middle East.”

Diplomats from other nations that participated in the deal have indicated they plan to behave as though the snapback of sanctions wasn’t really triggered and therefore requires no vote on their part.

While many nations are wary of Iran, the U.S. has been almost completely isolated at the UN in its latest efforts to raise pressure on the Islamic Republic, abandoned by even close allies such as France and the U.K. Building a coalition may be even harder now for Trump, who’s trailing in opinion polls less three months before the presidential election.

In a letter Thursday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif called on the Security Council and the world community to reject the Trump administration’s move, the semi-official Fars News agency reported. “The United States has no right to try and reinstate sanctions on Iran,” he said.

Russia’s envoy to the UN, Vassily Nebenzya, said in a tweet that the U.S. has no “legal right or reason to initiate this thing.” He said “there are provisions” in the nuclear deal that “were not exhausted yet. Of course we will challenge it.”

The U.S. legal argument, spelled out in a document accompanying Pompeo’s letter Thursday, hinges on the definition of the term “participant state” from UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which put the global body’s imprimatur on the nuclear accord known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action when it was agreed to in 2015.

All of the other participants in the accord that eased sanctions in return for limits on Iran’s nuclear program -- including U.S. allies France, Germany and the U.K. -- argue that Trump’s decision to back out of the deal in 2018 means the U.S. is no longer a participant. The U.S., argues the opposite: It says the “participant states” were fixed by resolution 2231 and leaving the deal doesn’t change that.

“It would have been a simple task for the Council, for example, to have stated that the right to initiate snapback is available only to States considered to be ‘currently’ participating in the JCPOA or in full performance of their JCPOA commitments at the time of the initiation,” the document submitted by Pompeo says. “But it did not do so.”

A U.S. effort last week to extend indefinitely a 13-year-old UN arms embargo on Iran was defeated in historic fashion: 11 members of the Security Council abstained, with just the Dominican Republic joining the U.S. as China and Russia vetoed the measure.

The State Department cited that Security Council rebuke in a statement after Trump spoke on Wednesday.

“Secretary Pompeo’s notification to the Council follows its inexcusable failure last week to extend the arms embargo on the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and anti-Semitism,” the department said. It added that the snapback would extend the arms embargo by default.

Trump has long called the agreement the “worst deal ever” and has said he wants a new accord to help foster peace across the Middle East. His administration has used increasingly tough economic and diplomatic pressure to try to convince European allies to quit the 2015 nuclear deal, saying Iran used the revenue it got from eased sanctions to finance conflicts from Syria to Yemen.

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