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UN Security Council Crushes Pompeo's Iran Sanctions Proposal
This is how stunningly weak America has become and how disastrous Trump’s Iran strategy is viewed by the rest of the world.
The United States suffered an embarrassing defeat at the United Nations on Friday [August 14, 2020] when the Security Council refused to go along with a U.S. proposal to extend an arms embargo against Iran that is due to expire in two months.
After a full 24 hours of voting conducted virtually, the 15-member council rebuffed a pared-down U.S. resolution that would have indefinitely extended the embargo, which has been in place since 2007.
The vote paves the way for the embargo to be lifted on Oct. 18, as described in the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and major world powers, including the United States....
It wasn’t a defeat. It was a rout. Of the 15 Security Council members, only the Dominican Republic voted with us.
The vote was a sharp repudiation of the Trump administration’s approach to Iran, the target of a “maximum pressure campaign” of sanctions that has been one of its signature foreign policies.
Underscoring the breadth of the opposition to the U.S. proposal, only the Dominican Republic voted with the United States for the embargo’s extension. Russia and China voted against it. Eleven members abstained, including France, Britain and Germany, the European countries that helped negotiate the 2015 deal and have struggled to salvage it.
This is what happens when you weaken America globally and spit in the face of allies for over three years.
....dropping out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the deal’s official name, has isolated the United States on the issue, even among allies that share its concerns over Iran and its imminent resumption of buying and selling weapons. Most members of the council want to preserve the nuclear agreement, and Iran could have bailed out of it if the embargo had been extended and resume its nuclear program full tilt.
Some observers fear that the U.S. pursuit of a sanctions snapback could cause an existential crisis in the Security Council itself.