Crude Summit: Pompeo blames Iran for UAE attacks

Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo blames Iran for the recent rocket attacks against the UAE and Saudi civilian and energy installations but notes UAE and Saudi leaders have been forced to reach out to Tehran after last year's change of guard in Washington.

A year after stepping down as the top US diplomat, Pompeo in a wide-ranging interview at the Argus Americas Crude Summit in Houston defended his Iran "maximum pressure" policy. "Ebrahim Raisi, the new president of Iran and the Ayatollah (Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader) are malign actors," Pompeo told Argus. "Just two weeks ago, they flew rockets and missiles into Abu Dhabi, where there were many Americans."

The Iran-aligned Houthi group, which has been fighting a Saudi-led coalition in Yemen since 2015, claimed responsibility for the UAE attack. Notably, Abu Dhabi blamed only the Houthis for the attack and made no mention of Iran, as did the State Department. With some encouragement from Washington, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh last year began quiet diplomacy with Tehran to defuse tensions.

In Pompeo's view, the Mideast Gulf Arab countries' outreach to Tehran reflects developments in Washington. "The crown princes of the UAE and Saudi Arabia are smart leaders," Pompeo said. "When America abandons them for Iran, they are going to do the things that take care of their own people."

The US responded forcefully to previous attacks against Mideast Gulf Arab producers, Pompeo said, adding that former president Donald Trump's administration stood by Riyadh "when the whole world wanted to disassociate themselves from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia after the death of Jamal Khashoggi."

The US' immediate reaction to the September 2019 attacks on Saudi Aramco's major energy facilities at Abqaiq and elsewhere -- the US attributed the attack to Tehran -- was muted and Trump said at the time that it was not an attack on the US since the targets were in Saudi Arabia. That attack followed a string of incidents involving tankers in the Mideast Gulf as tensions rose following the decision to fully impose sanctions against Iranian oil exports.

But Pompeo said that the US in fact responded forcefully to the Abqaiq attack, including by providing Saudi Arabia with defense equipment. The US response "reached a high point with the strike on Qassim Soleimani three months later," he said, referring to the January 2020 targeted killing of the Iranian military commander in a US missile strike.

In Pompeo's telling, that attack established US deterrence in the Middle East. But attacks attributed to Iran continued unabated through 2020 and since then. Iran has also managed to find ways to export its oil to China, despite Pompeo's declared policy of "zero exports" from Iran.

Pompeo insisted that Iran had faced real economic pressure under the Trump administration and argued that Iran's exports to China shot up after President Joe Biden took office. "Nothing ever reaches zero in the world," Pompeo said, adding that "a massive change took place when the Biden administration came in." China is purchasing Iranian oil "in staggering volumes and with little discount," he said.

Pompeo criticized the Biden administration's policy of trying to restore the Iran nuclear deal that the Trump administration abandoned in 2018, and argued that demanding that Tehran change its relations with its neighbors should have been a subject in US-Iranian diplomacy. A promise by Democratic foreign policy advisers to restart talks with Tehran allowed Iran's leaders to hold out for a deal after the election, Pompeo said.

Iran is one of the US foreign policy areas that underwent dramatic change twice in the past five years. Nearly every Republican senator in 2015 signed an open letter to Ayatollah Khamenei that warned him that a Republican president would abandon the nuclear deal negotiated by former president Barack Obama. Biden as candidate promised to restore the deal that was abandoned by Trump.

The frequent change in Iran policy does not affect US standing in the world since Iran is not "remotely the central challenge for the US," Pompeo said. "We have a democracy, where people get to choose who their leaders are, and they get to choose their policies."

By Haik Gugarats