Secretary of State Pompeo contented that “we're going to continue to do our best to ensure that particular shipment [of crude oil aboard the Grace 1/Adrian Darya 1 tanker] doesn't get into the hands of terrorists so it can risk American lives or lives of citizens in any other part of the world”. He further underscored that “we put in place a set of sanctions designed to deny the ayatollah the wealth to terrorise the world conventionally or with nuclear weapons, and we've been pretty effective”. We can see with Hizbollah…we can see with the Shiite forces in Iraq. We can see that they have fewer dollars. They're having to make really difficult decisions about whether to spend money on defence or just spend money back home”. He added that “we hope they will ultimately conclude that the best thing to do is to rejoin the community of nations, to stop conducting assassination campaigns in Europe, to cease with terror operations supporting Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip or Hizbollah in Lebanon and Syria”. “I don’t know that they will”, Pompeo assessed. “They’re pretty wedded to it, it’s ideological. It’s not even about logic. It’s deeply ingrained in their revolutionary culture, and we hope that the Iranian people will see a way to get the leadership in Iran to change its behaviour”.