President Trump will impose sanctions on China if Beijing authorizes arms sales to Iran following his move to dismantle the 2015 nuclear deal and renew international sanctions on Tehran.
“We’re going to go after every violation that we can muster the resources to respond to,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the Washington Examiner. “That will be [the case], whether it’s Chinese violations or violations from the Russians, arms or economic sales; these U.N. Security Council resolutions are serious business.”
Pompeo raised that threat as the administration moved in the United Nations Security Council to implement the “snapback” of all the sanctions waived at the implementation of the nuclear pact. That legal maneuver was undertaken in order to preserve an international arms embargo scheduled to expire next month under the terms of the Iran deal, even though key European allies joined with Russia and China in arguing that the United States has no right to invoke snapback due to Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the accord.
“We don’t need a cheering section to validate our moral compass,” Ambassador Kelly Craft, the U.S. representative to the U.N., said Monday. “We do not find comfort based solely on numbers, particularly when the majority has found themselves in an uncomfortable position of underwriting terrorism, chaos, and conflict. We refuse to be members of that club.”
Pompeo, in the interview, faulted European powers for allowing “the Holy Grail myth of the JCPOA, still in their heads, as something of value” to discourage them from siding with the U.S. at the Security Council. And he argued that the U.S. effort to preclude Iran from purchasing new armaments provides benefits to European countries even more than to the U.S.
“Having Chinese tanks, or Chinese air defense systems, or defensive missile systems in Iran, in the first instance threatens the people of Iran, in the second instance, threatens the people of the Middle East, and the next people who come under threat are the people who live in Europe,” he told the Washington Examiner. “The real exposure is to European national security from these missile systems, air defense systems.”
France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have emphasized that the European Union’s “embargoes on conventional arms exports and missile technology will remain in force until 2023.” And both the EU and the U.S. have blackballed Russia’s defense industry in retaliation for the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 — a dynamic that could leave China as the prospective Iranian arms supplier most capable of exposing the disagreement between Washington and European capitals.
Pompeo, asked if European leaders might “cooperate with you in punishing” such Chinese sales, “even if they are unwilling to concede your legal argument” regarding snapback, suggested that they would be forced to do so by public opinion.
“I think European people will come to see that if the Chinese are selling Iran these weapon systems, this isn’t something their government should support,” he told the Washington Examiner. “Indeed, they should work alongside the United States to enforce the existing Security Council resolutions.”
