William Shawcross

Benjamin Netanyahu: Arab countries know that Iran wants to conquer them all

Bibi Netanyahu was in London this month after meeting Angela Merkel, Emanuel Macron and Theresa May, the leaders of the three European countries which had committed most to President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Before he flew back to Israel he came to a crowded public meeting at Policy Exchange, whose director, Dean Godson, had asked me to talk with him. I asked him first what he had told the Europeans, who had reacted badly to President Trump’s unilateral action on Iran.

‘Well I’ll tell you what I didn’t tell them. I didn’t tell them to pull out of the Iran agreement – because I think it’s effectively defunct. The minute the United States decided to pull out of this very bad agreement … the weight of the American economy forced the issue. If any company has to choose whether to do business with Iran or with the United States, that’s a no-brainer. Companies are pulling out of Iran now and it’s a good thing because if we have learned anything it’s to stop aggressive tyrannical regimes early on.’

Netanyahu said he had always thought the deal flawed because it massively rewarded Iran for agreeing only to delay its progress to nuclear weapons. It was ‘a cash machine’ which lifted sanctions against Iran, extended its credit and gave its theocratic leaders ‘billions and billions of dollars’, which they were supposed to invest in Iran but instead used ‘to fuel their dreams of empire and conquest throughout the Middle East, in Yemen and Syria and elsewhere.’

Unlike the Europeans, Israel’s self-confident leader believes that ‘the deal was bad any way you looked at it’, but now President Trump had slammed the cash machine shut.

‘And so my real focus in this visit was not about the Iran deal. My real focus was about reversing Iran’s aggression in the region, mainly getting them out of Syria, all of Syria.

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