President Donald Trump said Tuesday that Iran “must stop sponsoring terror” and its “bloody proxy wars” as part of any nuclear deal with the U.S. — key provisions that were absent from the deal reached by President Barack Obama in 2015.
Trump spoke to a gathering of Arab leaders at the Gulf Cooperation Council in Saudi Arabia before leaving for Qatar on his visit to the Middle East — one focused on both commercial ties and diplomatic outreach.
Trump said:
We’ll stand with our friends and partners, and we’ll confront the aggression that threatens us all. I want to make a deal with Iran, I want to do something if it’s possible, but for that to happen it must stop sponsoring terror, halt its bloody proxy wars, and permanently and verifiably cease its pursuit of nuclear weapons. They cannot have a nuclear weapon.
Trump reacted by raising the stakes in nuclear negotiations with Iran, demanding an end to the regime’s sponsorship of terrorist proxies abroad, such as the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has said that a bad deal with Iran is worse than no deal at all, warned Congress in a speech 2015 that any deal with Iran would have to “stop its aggression against its neighbors in the Middle East,” “stop supporting terrorism around the world,” and “stop threatening to annihilate my country, Israel, the one and only Jewish state.” Obama’s deal had none of those elements.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
