President Donald Trump must stay the course in his determination to end Iran's nuclear threat to the world, Ron Dermer, Israel's Ambassador to the United States, told Newsmax TV on Tuesday.
And part of that pressure must be the imposition of severe economic sanctions – sanctions that were lifted when a nuclear deal was hammered out by the Obama administration in 2015, Dermer told hosts Miranda Khan, John Cardillo, and Gina Loudon on Tuesday's "America Talks Live."
“[Trump] has to set a clear policy . . . that Iran must never be allowed to develop nuclear weapons," Dermer said. "And the only deal the president should accept is one that actually achieves that goal.
"The best solution is to fully dismantle Iran's nuclear program. . . . Iran has proven to the world it cannot be trusted with any capability, so I hope moving forward the president will say this is what America wants to see."
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Dermer made his remarks a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed, in detail, what he called a "half ton" of Iranian nuclear documents collected by Israeli intelligence. Those documents, Netanyahu said, prove Iran covered up its nuclear weapons program before signing an historic nuclear disarmament deal with other nations in 2015.
"It goes to show you, they kept all these things in a secret vault because they want to use these things in the future when all of the deal's restrictions on Iran's nuclear program sunset, when they expire in a few years," Dermer told Newsmax TV.
"Iran then won't have to sneak in or break in to the nuclear club, they can just walk into the nuclear club, and that's why what Netanyahu showed [Monday] was so important.
"The most important move is to prevent Iran from ever developing nuclear weapons. That would be the greatest danger to the world. It would marry militant Islam to nuclear weapons.'"
Under the 2015 historic deal to scale back Iran's nuclear program, financial sanctions imposed by the U.S., the European Union, and United Nations were lifted. In return, Iran agreed to lengthy curbs on its nuclear program, including a restriction on uranium enrichment for 15 years, as well as an agreement not to build new enrichment facilities for that period.
Dermer said the biggest problem with the three-year-old nuclear deal is that it does not, in the end, prevent the Middle East nation from developing nukes.
"All it does is put temporary restrictions on Iran's nuclear program that are automatically removed in a few years," he said. "Not if Iran changes its behavior, not if Iran stops being the foremost sponsor of terrorism in the world.
"In a few years, all of those restrictions will be removed and Iran will be able to enrich uranium on a massive scale. This is why this deal is so bad, this is by the way why Israel opposed it.
"If there was a deal on the table that would actually prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, I'd be going house to house in the United States of America to basically beg people to accept it."
At the moment, all Iran has to do is "be patient and wait" for the deal to expire, according to Dermer.
"And what they are doing now is they are continuing to develop their ballistic missiles, which the ranges are getting further and further, so they can ultimately hit the United States of America," he said.
"And [Israel has just] just shown that they have an advanced weapons program, and what they want to do when these restrictions are removed are to bring all of these elements together and then have a deliverable nuclear device that can threaten America and threaten the world."
Dermer said economic restrictions on Iran that were lifted as part of the nuclear deal have provided it with hundreds of billions of dollars it is "using to fuel and fund its war machine throughout the Middle East."
"They are just richer and more dangerous and the chance of war are greater," Dermer said. "People said [when the deal was made] this will preserve peace. For whom? It's not preserving peace for the Arabs. It's not preserving peace for Israel. We're constantly fighting Iran's aggression throughout the region."
He urged the United States to press ahead with more economic sanctions against Iran.
"Iran is very susceptible to economic pressures, and if you ratchet up those economic pressures it can cause tremendous instability there," Dermer said.
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