Washington 0
5 March 2020

The U.S. Special Representative for Iran, Brian Hook, posited that “if you want to make a difference in their [ie, Iran’s] behaviour, you have to restore deterrence, and deterrence is not static, it’s dynamic. You can lose it very quickly, and gaining it back requires some time… we will attack if we are attacked first”. He also stated that “we have pulled forward the expiration date of the Iran deal because we don’t want the regime and its proxies to be stronger when the deal expires. Being outside of the deal gives us a much better position to accomplish our objective that Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon”. Hook went on to assert that “all that we can do is put in place a foreign policy in a language that this regime understands, and they only understand economic pressure, diplomatic isolation and the credible threat of military force”, adding that “we’re not looking for regime change”. “If we can sit down with the Iranian regime, we can work through a way forward”, Hook predicted. “In the meantime, we’re denying this regime historic levels of revenues that it uses to destabilise the Middle East”.   

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