The newly-appointed US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, says President Donald Trump is “unlikely to stay” in the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six world countries as a deadline looms for the US to announce its stance.
"There's been no decision, so the team is working and I am sure we will have lots of conversations to deliver what the president has made clear," Pompeo told reporters during a press conference on Friday at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, where he said he had discussed the Iran deal with counterparts.
"The President has been clear -- absent a substantial fix, absent overcoming the shortcomings, the flaws of the deal -- he is unlikely to stay in that deal past this May," Pompeo said.
Trump has been a vociferous critic of the Iran nuclear agreement, which was negotiated under his predecessor, Barack Obama. He has called the agreement the “worst deal ever” and even threatened to tear it up.
Back in January, Trump said it was the last time he was extending the sanctions relief for Iran as part of the nuclear deal, giving the European signatories a May 12 deadline to fix what he claimed to be the “flaws” in the agreement or he would refuse to waive those bans.
During a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday, Trump reiterated his hostile stance on the JCPOA and described it as a “bad” deal “with decayed foundations,” noting, “Nobody knows what I’m going to do on the 12th.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Tehran will “mostly likely” abandon the agreement should the United States choose to withdraw from it.