TEHRAN - Former U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo acknowledged on Sunday that the Trump administration failed to bring Tehran to the negotiating table for a new nuclear deal.

During an interview with John Catsimatidis on his radio show on WABC 770 AM, Pompeo said, “We didn’t get all the way to where we would’ve hoped we could get in respect to getting Iran to stand down and enter an agreement.”

The former hawkish secretary of state again defended Trump’s illegal moves against Iran, claiming reentering the Iran nuclear deal would make West Asia “less secure.”

Trump withdrew from the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), in May 2018 and imposed harsh sanctions on the country within his “maximum pressure” campaign.

President Biden has said he would rejoin the deal if Iran came back into compliance regarding limits on its nuclear program. However, Iran has said it was the U.S. that quit the nuclear deal and naturally it should be the first party to rejoin the agreement.

Iran remained fully loyal to the JCPOA one year after Trump pulled the U.S. out of the deal. However, in May 2019 the Supreme National Security Council announced that Iran’s “strategic patience” is over started to gradually reduce its commitments to the deal in accordance to paragraph 36 of the JCPOA.   At the time Iran said if the European parties to the deal protect Iran from U.S. sanctions it will reverse its decisions. However, the Europeans did nothing in practice and just expressed verbal support for the JCPOA.

PA/PA