President Donald Trump plans to announce a new strategy on Iran Friday afternoon, but the White House has released some of the major points of his plan ahead of the speech.
Trump’s strategy is a reaction to decades of Iran pursuing “a steady policy of spreading a revolutionary ideology aimed at undermining the international system and many states by force and subversion.” Their main enemy “continues to be the United States of America” which they repeatedly call “the Great Satan.”
“Iran exports violence, destabilizes its neighbors, and sponsors terrorism abroad,” the White House said in a statement. “Within Iran, under Khameneis rule the Iranian government has oppressed its people, abusing their rights, restricting their access to the internet and the outside world, rigging elections, shooting student protesters in the street, and imprisoning political reformers like Mir Hussein Musavi and Mehdi Karroubi.”
According to the White House, the full range of the Iranian threat includes:
- Ballistic missile development and proliferation
- Material and financial support for terrorism and extremism
- Support for the Assad regimes atrocities against the Syrian people
- Unrelenting hostility to Israel
- Consistently threatening freedom of navigation, especially in the strategically vital Persian Gulf
- Cyber-attacks against the United States, Israel, and Americas other allies and partners in the Middle East
- Grievous human rights abuses
- Arbitrary detention of foreigners, including United States citizens, on specious charges and without due process.
The Trump administration feels that “the previous Administration’s myopic focus on Iran’s nuclear program to the exclusion of the regimes many other malign activities allowed Iran’s influence in the region to reach a high-water mark,” and that “in doing so, the United States has neglected Irans steady expansion of proxy forces and terrorist networks aimed at keeping its neighbors weak and unstable in hopes of dominating the greater Middle East. Recently, the Iranian regime has accelerated the seeding of these networks with increasingly destructive weapons as they try to establish a bridge from Iran to Lebanon and Syria.”
The White House intends to counter Iran’s threats to world peace by issuing a new Iran policy.
- The United States new Iran strategy focuses on neutralizing the Government of Irans destabilizing influence and constraining its aggression, particularly its support for terrorism and militants
- We will revitalize our traditional alliances and regional partnerships as bulwarks against Iranian subversion and restore a more stable balance of power in the region.
- We will work to deny the Iranian regime and especially the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) funding for its malign activities, and oppose IRGC activities that extort the wealth of the Iranian people.
- We will counter threats to the United States and our allies from ballistic missiles and other asymmetric weapons
- We will rally the international community to condemn the IRGCs gross violations of human rights and its unjust detention of American citizens and other foreigners on specious charges.
* Most importantly, we will deny the Iranian regime all paths to a nuclear weapon
