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QUESTION:  If we can just switch gears for a moment, I’d like to quickly ask about Iran.  This has been no holiday for the bad guys.  We’ve been talking about China, but the administration is also talking about a potential lifting of UN sanctions on conventional weapons for Iran.  I know a lot of this has been behind the scenes.  What do you see as the escalating dangers from Iran, and how optimistic are you that we’re going to be able to prevail in snapping back those kinds of sanctions onto Iran?

SECRETARY POMPEO:  The continuing threat from the Islamic Republic of Iran remains.  It has violated a number of its nuclear commitments that it signed up for under the JCPOA.  We have continued our campaign.  The most obvious thing that people see us do is the sanctions that we put in place, but the campaign is much greater than that.  We put resources in place to deter Iranian aggression on the ground.  We’ve put diplomatic power behind uniting the world in a number of ways with respect to Iran’s terrorism.  We have convinced the Germans just last month to designate Hizballah.  We’re working with partners all around the world to continue to constrain Iran’s capacity to ultimately get a nuclear weapon and to limit their capabilities on missiles and terrorism as well.

As you mentioned, in October of this year, on the 18th of October, the Russians will be able to sell equipment to Iran.  They’re lining it up.  The Chinese will be able to sell tanks to Iran.  I’m confident looking to figure out how they can make money from that.  We have a plan that we believe will successfully prevent that from happening.

We are hopeful.  We are hopeful the world will unite, that the United Kingdom or other parties to the JCPOA will recognize the threat from the expiration of the arms embargo that occurs just, goodness, a few months from now, and themselves use their rights to make sure that that doesn’t happen.

We’d love to extend the prohibition on arm sales to Iran by agreement of all of the parties, all of the parties to the participants in 2231.  In the event that doesn’t happen, we’re going to use our diplomatic capability to prevent it from happening.  It’s too important.  It’s too dangerous to the world to allow Iran, after just what would be now five years of the agreement, to be able to again arm themselves, purchase high-end weapon systems from the Russians and the Iranians, making it even more difficult for us to stop them from building out their nuclear program.  It was a fundamental flaw of the JCPOA, and we’re determined to do everything we can to prevent that expiration of the arms embargo from taking place.  I’m confident that we can do it.

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QUESTION:  I want to just take you back quickly to a follow-up on the Iran sanctions question.  Big headlines in recent days about an illegal Iranian oil shipment to our friends, the dictatorship in Venezuela.  I know that there was a lot of debate going on inside the administration about what our options were, what should we do.  Ultimately, the decision was made to let that go, but can you help us out with the thinking on (a) what to do about that, and (b) why we decided not to somehow block the shipment of that oil?

SECRETARY POMPEO:  Yeah.  Danielle, I don’t want to talk about internal deliberations, but we did manage to stop – I think it ended up being four of seven or four of nine of the vessels that were bringing gasoline to Maduro.  Look, we have a sanctions regime in place on the Islamic Republic of Iran and a sanctions regime in place with respect to Venezuela.  Those regimes are never perfect at enforcement.  We have had real luck.  We’ve taken Iran from about three million barrels a day down to – I guess last month it was perhaps as little as 70,000 barrels.  We’ve had an average of under half a million barrels a day for – I think it’s the last six or eight months now.

So the sanctions have been very effective, but whether it’s North Korea or Venezuela or Iran, we never get perfect enforcement.  We have to make good decisions about how to do that rationally and how to achieve it.  The American people should know we watched what happened there, we understand what happened there, we observed all of the activity around it, and there will be people who engage in these activities, who try to violate American sanctions, who will ultimately be held accountable for what took place.  This was just enough gasoline for a couple of weeks in Venezuela.  I wish that it had not gotten there.  We’re watching it.  We know that this will happen again, and I – the world should watch as we do everything we can to make sure that we enforce these sanctions in ways that make sense for the American people.

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