National security adviser John Bolton said at a press conference in Israel that the U.S. will push as hard as possible to stop Iran from launching its own nuclear program, CNN reported.
Bolton recently visited the Middle East while tensions were mounting between Washington and Tehran over sanctions, as well as fear over the war in Syria.
President Donald Trump said he was planning to withdraw from the Iran deal back in May, and with it to abandon the multinational agreement that was signed to stop Iran’s nuclear program.
The Trump administration returned to the old habit of slapping sanctions again this month, most of them due to take effect in November against the country’s oil industry, which makes up one-fifth of the GDP of Iran.
Bolton stood behind Trump’s move to impose new sanctions against the Islamic republic, while the President called Iran “the central banker of international terrorism since 1979.”
The NS advisor added that the accord provided Tehran with “new assets it could use for its nuclear weapons program, for its ballistic program, for its terrorist activities.”
“What we want is massive change in the regime’s behavior,” Bolton said. “Regime change in Iran is not American policy,” he added.
On the other hand, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif slammed the States calling them “addicted to sanctions,” adding that sanctions were a “weapon that has been proved not to work.”
“We felt that the United States had learned that at least as far as Iran is concerned, sanctions do produce economic hardship but do not produce the political outcomes that they intended them to produce, and I thought that the Americans had learned that lesson. Unfortunately, I was wrong,” Zarif said.
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