Dr. Sebastian Gorka, chief strategist for the MAGA Coalition, joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow for a full hour on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about the possible end of the Iran nuclear deal.
Gorka said that “the jury is not out” on the potential recertification of the Iran nuclear deal in October.
“I can tell you one thing: I was in the Oval the day it was recertified last. It was the president behind the Resolute Desk. It was Steve [Bannon] and myself on the side of the president. It was H.R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson, [Steven] Mnuchin who were saying we have to recertify,” he recalled.
“I’ll tell you one thing, the president was not happy last time about his being pushed to recertify. He said, ‘You’re giving me the same excuses you gave me last time.’ I told everybody after I left the White House he will not recertify a third time with these excuses,” Gorka said.
“The nail in the coffin, or the thing that supports the president, is what we found out a week ago: there’s this section T, or paragraph section T, of the original Iran deal that is supposed to allow the IAEA inspectors, the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, onto military sites in Iran. Iran has refused access to the IAEA, and I think that’s it,” he judged.
“So there will be no recertification. The question is, what happens in the 60 days after that? Does the administration throw it to the Senate to deal with this? Do we threaten a new sanctions package and they try and renegotiate a new deal? I’m leery of some kind of ‘half-pregnant’ solution coming outside of the Swamp and the establishment. But the president knows he can’t recertify,” he said.
Gorka explained that if Iranian compliance is not recertified, it will open a 60-day window in which sanctions canceled by the nuclear deal can be re-imposed against Iran. At that point, the president must decide whether to “snap back all the old sanctions” or “go back to the drawing board” with our European allies to craft a new nuclear deal.
“The dirty little secret about the Iran deal? There’s only one country Iran is actually threatening every Friday in the mosques, apart from Israel, and it’s not Germany. It’s not France. It’s not the U.K. It’s us,” he noted. “The idea that this is a club of equals dealing with Iran, it’s totally bogus. Everybody else on that deal, especially Germany and France, is making a lot of money in Iran. Therefore, they’re not exactly unbiased in terms of the JCPOA and doing business.”
Gorka credited President Trump with pushing European nations to meet their defense spending obligations under the NATO charter, thus moving one step closer to becoming “serious nations.”
“If you want to be our friend, you need to be serious. And when you’re spending 70 percent of your defense budget on personnel costs and pensions, you are not a serious nation,” he said.
As for strife inside the Trump administration over recertification of the Iran deal, Gorka said with a heavy sigh that he promised the president he would not “attack individual members of the Cabinet,” but he suggested defenders of the Iran deal were excessively worried about the reaction of allied nations at a time when America should be showing decisive leadership.
“When we talk about things like ‘strategic patience’ and ‘leading from behind,’ that’s when things collapse,” he argued, citing two notorious foreign policy slogans from the Obama administration. “That’s when Crimea gets invaded. That’s when North Korea proceeds to blackmail us with their nuclear weapons.”
Speaking of North Korea, Gorka said China is the key to resolving the nuclear missile crisis without a military confrontation.
“It’s not about this crazy guy in North Korea. It’s about Beijing – because it’s not 80 percent; it’s upwards of 93, 94 percent of all imports into North Korea come from China. China controls the spigot. If they want to solve this problem, they can solve it right now,” he explained.
“They’re starting to realize how serious it is, but they have to really turn the spigots off,” he urged.
Dr. Sebastian Gorka is a former deputy assistant to President Trump and former National Security editor for Breitbart News.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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