Representative Jim Banks is worried that the White House is pulling its punches on new threats from Iran amid ongoing nuclear negotiations.
Representative Jim Banks is worried that the White House is pulling its punches on new threats from Iran amid ongoing nuclear negotiations.
I t’s been two years since a U.S. strike took out General Qasem Soleimani, the ruthless paramilitary commander who attained legendary status within the ranks of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Top Iranian officials commemorated the January 3 anniversary of Soleimani’s killing with attacks on the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq and Syria, as well as threats to murder Americans involved in coordinating the strike.
But those threats, which have taken the form of videos posted online and have been accompanied by sanctions against U.S. officials, have not received as much attention as one would have expected.
While the Biden administration has promised to retaliate against any Iranian attacks on Americans, Representative Jim Banks, the chairman of the Republican Study Committee — which is the largest group of conservative lawmakers in the House — said that President Biden hasn’t done nearly enough.
The U.S. is currently participating in indirect talks with Iran, as it negotiates its potential return to the 2015 nuclear deal. In a letter to Biden this week, which was obtained exclusively by National Review, Banks blamed the White House’s focus on those negotiations, and the diplomatic concessions that have come with them, for emboldening Iran.
“Iran feels more comfortable making these threats and potentially acting on them as well, because the US appears less willing to enforce sanctions, less committed to supporting our regional allies, and less interested in maintaining a military deterrence to prevent a nuclear Iran and other forms of Iranian aggression,” wrote Banks in the letter.
Among the diplomatic concessions already made, the administration has taken a series of steps to unwind the Trump-era maximum-pressure sanctions campaign, including by exempting South Korea from sanctions that previously prohibited it from sending funds to Iran.
All this is happening against a backdrop of a quickly escalating Iranian retaliation campaign. The country’s foreign ministry on January 8 announced that it had blacklisted 52 U.S. officials it said were involved in the Soleimani strike. Those officials included General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as former national-security adviser Robert O’Brien.
Although the blacklisting only pertains to seizure of those officials’ assets, which Iran of course has no ability to do, there’s potentially a more malicious message contained within the sanctions move. “What a lot of insiders believe is that whenever Iran does these ‘sanctions lists,’ it’s also sort of an informal hit list,” said former State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus during an appearance on Fox News this week. She added that Iran is threatening to kill former Trump administration officials on U.S. soil.
Regime affiliates have long circulated explicit revenge threats in posts online, as well as through comments to state-media outlets, according to Jason Brodsky, policy director at United Against Nuclear Iran.
Although Iranian officials take care to avoid posting these threats to platforms, such as Twitter, that say they have policies against death threats, the threats are circulated elsewhere. One example of this is a poster circulated online by the office of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, pledging that “revenge is certain” over Soleimani’s slaying. The poster, Brodsky told NR in a message, “is meant to be spread far and wide. The Office of the Supreme Leader controls a huge propaganda apparatus for this purpose.”
Yesterday, the office of the supreme leader doubled down on previous threats to kill Trump, posting a 90-second animated video online depicting an imagined assassination of the former president on the golf course at Mar-a-Lago.
This, Banks told NR in a statement, should have been the last straw. “Iran’s supreme leader threatened to kill a former U.S. president today,” he said through a spokesman after the video’s release. “But the Biden administration hasn’t done anything about it and is continuing negotiations in Vienna like nothing’s new. President Biden needs to come out publicly and condemn this immediately and end all talks with the regime.”
On January 9, after Iran’s sanctions announcement, national-security adviser Jake Sullivan did issue a statement condemning the move: “Make no mistake: the United States of America will protect and defend its citizens. This includes those serving the United States now and those who formerly served.” Sullivan pledged that “severe consequences” would follow were Iran to carry out attacks on any Americans.
Although Banks called this a “welcome statement” in his letter to Biden, he said that the White House’s foreign-policy decisions needed to match its rhetoric: “I am afraid that your National Security Advisor’s tough rhetoric unbacked by action would not discourage, but rather only invite further aggression from the Iranian regime, not only in the Middle East, but also against Americans on US soil.”
These concerns are far from theoretical. As the congressman noted in his letter, U.S. law enforcement stopped an Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in a D.C. restaurant in 2011, as well as an attempt to kidnap dissident journalist Masih Alinejad from her home in Brooklyn last year.
But rather than cut off talks with Tehran, which have stalled, over these threats, the Biden administration is doubling down. From the White House press briefing room on Wednesday, Press Secretary Jen Psaki rolled out a messaging campaign to blame the Trump administration for every single one of Iran’s malign activities since the U.S. left the Iran deal in 2018.
In the meantime, the Iranian threats will keep flowing, and the gears of diplomacy will continue to turn.