Iran told: comply with US demands or face 'strongest sanctions in history'

Mike Pompeo has threatened Iran with the “strongest sanctions in history” if it does not comply with a list of a dozen US demands.

In a speech that attempted to lay out the Trump administration’s strategy on Iran after quitting the nuclear deal it agreed with other major powers in 2015, the secretary of state warned that the US would not just reimpose all the sanctions that were in place before the deal, but also pile additional punitive measures.

“The Iranian regime should know this is just the beginning,” Pompeo said.

The speech did not explicitly advocate regime change, but in remarks immediately afterwards Pompeo suggested that it would be up to the Iranian people to end the US pressure campaign by changing their own government.

“I can’t put a timeline on it, but at the end of the day, the Iranian people will decide the timeline,” Pompeo said at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank in Washington. “The Iranian people will get to make a choice about their leadership. If they make the decision quickly that will be wonderful. If they choose not to do so, we will stay hard at this until we achieve the outcomes that I set forth.”

Among the 12 conditions laid down by Pompeo were: demand Iran to give a full account of its alleged past work on nuclear weapons development; stop all uranium enrichment; halt launches of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles; end its support for Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad; withdraw all forces under Iranian command from Syria; and end support for Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Pompeo said the Trump administration would not separate negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme from other issues like regional conflicts and missile development.

However, he did not make clear how the US would be able galvanise international support for isolating Iran after Trump violated the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – a deal that has widespread global support. European parties to the agreement – the UK, France and Germany – have vowed to try to salvage it and proposed to counteract threatened US sanctions on their companies for continuing to do business with Iran.

“The prospect of a new jumbo Iran treaty is going to be very, very difficult,” said the UK foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, after Pompeo’s speech.

“I think if you try now to fold all those issues – the ballistic missiles, Iran’s misbehaviour, Iran’s disruptive activity in the region and the nuclear question – if you try to fold all those into a giant negotiation, a new jumbo Iran negotiation, a new treaty – that’s what seems to be envisaged – I don’t see that being very easy to achieve, in anything like a reasonable timetable,” Johnson told journalists in Buenos Aires.

He suggested the JCPOA’s narrow range, criticised by Trump and Pompeo, had been a good thing. “The advantage of the JCPOA was that it had a very clear objective. It protected the world from an Iranian nuclear bomb, and in return it gave the Iranians some recognisable economic benefits. That was at the core of it. Johnson added: “The Americans have walked away from that.”

Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister tweeted that the United States was repeating “the same wrong choices”.

Suzanne Maloney, deputy director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution, said: “Pompeo has not outlined a strategy, but rather a grab bag of wishful thinking that can only be interpreted as a call for regime change in Iran.

“Note that no other US president has openly sought to effect regime change in Iran. This is a first,” Maloney said in a series of tweets. “This is no longer about Trump fulfilling campaign promises or trying to satisfy his own ego re: a ‘bigger, better deal.’ It’s his infantile approach to foreign policy that purports to solve intractable challenges through the application of maximalist pressure.”