Nikki Haley: ‘Every Threat to Peace’ in the Middle East Tied to Iran

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley urged the U.N. Security Council to back President Trump’s tougher stance on Iran Wednesday, claiming that most threats in the region are connected to the rogue Islamic regime.

“We can’t talk about stability in the Middle East without talking about Iran,” Haley said at a session focused on the situation in the Middle East. “That’s because nearly every threat to peace and security in the Middle East is connected to Iran’s outlaw behavior.”

Haley’s remarks come a week after President Trump declined to certify Iran’s compliance with the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, booting the issue to Congress and putting the deal in jeopardy. The move has faced opposition from the international community at large, but countries such as France have expressed a willingness to beef up the restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile program and other areas of the deal.

Haley noted that while the IAEA, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, has said Iran is in compliance with the deal, it also found “multiple, flagrant violations on the resolution’s non-nuclear provisions.” She accused the council of hiding from the truth of what Iran is doing.

“Every six months, the Security Council is presented with this laundry list of bad news, but somehow manages to only hear the good news,” she said. “Some countries, to their credit, have called out Iran for its malign behavior. But as a Council, we’ve adopted a dangerously short-sighted approach.”

Calling it “foolish” to only judge Iran by the confines of the deal, Haley called on the Council to use the opportunity of Trump’s crackdown to get tough on the Islamic regime, arguing that the Council has allowed Iran to violate Security Council resolutions as long as it sticks to the technical terms of the Iran deal.

Haley went on to point to a list of the highlights of Iran’s violations, including its support of Houthi rebels in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as the Assad regime in Syria. She again mentioned the launch of an ICBM-enabled missile, something the U.S. and its allies had drawn attention to over the summer.

“This should be a clarion call to everyone in the United Nations,” Haley said. “When a rogue regime starts down the path of ballistic missiles, it tells us that we will soon have another North Korea on our hands.”

However, it appears that Haley’s words may fall on deaf ears. According to the Associated Press, of the major powers on the Council, Britain was the only one to support the U.S. call for broader action against Iran, while Russia’s ambassador hailed the deal as a stabilizing move in the region.

Adam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY