Iran hawks lay out their wish list for Trump era
Outright repeal is out, sanctions and military pushback are in.
Iran hawks on and off Capitol Hill laid out their clearest wish list to date for the next four years during a Dec. 7 briefing.
Lawmakers and outside experts agreed that President-elect Donald Trump would be unwise to rip up the nuclear deal on day one. Barring that, however, the bipartisan group of panelists encouraged him to challenge even minor technical violations of the deal, slap sanctions on thousands more Iranian companies and send Iranian vessels that challenge the US Navy to the bottom of the Persian Gulf.
“It’s clear we’re about to enter a new phase of Iranian sanctions,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs panel on the Middle East. “We will see a flurry of Iran-related activity early in the new year. I think we have an opportunity to undo a lot of the problematic concessions that we have seen over the past few years. And. I. Can’t. Wait.”
Ros-Lehtinen was the keynote speaker at the briefing organized by United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), which lobbied against the deal in 2015, and the hawkish Foreign Policy Institute. She laid out a three-pronged approach that consists of “enforcing current sanctions, expanding the other non-nuclear related sanctions and perhaps even rolling back or tightening provisions of the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action].”
