The United States vice president Mike Pence has accused European powers of undermining the US crackdown over Iran by trying to break the US sanctions against Iran.
According to Reuters news reports, while speaking at a middle east peace summit in Warsaw which was attended by sixty nations, including Israel and Gulf Arab states, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “historical turning point” for an alliance against Iran. Russia, the Palestinians and Iran were absent.
European power who did oppose the US President Donald Trump’s administration’s decision to pull back from Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Iran, were sceptical of a summit excluding Iran. Germany and France refused to send their top-level diplomats to the summit.
Pence said: “Sadly, some of our leading European partners have not been near as cooperative. In fact, they have led the effort to create mechanisms to break up our sanctions.”
In practice, European companies have accepted new US sanctions over Iran and abandoned plans to invest there.
While calling on European power to follow US and exit from the pact, Pence said, “The time has come for our European partners to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal and join with us.”
He said a new European scheme to trade with Iran was “an effort to break American sanctions against Iran’s murderous revolutionary regime”.
Pence said, “It is an ill-advised step that will only strengthen Iran, weaken the EU and create still more distance between Europe and the United States.”
At the summit, European diplomats rejected Pence’s accusations saying, “We strongly disagree”. European power envoy said: “We want to push Iran to good results and don’t want to push Iran outside of its nuclear commitment.”