Kamala Harris says Iran is ‘greatest adversary’ of US | Kamala Harris News | The Round Table US Vice President Kamala Harris announces Iran is the most significant enemy of the United States, citing Tehran’s recent ballistic missile attack against Israel.
In an interview with the CBS television network aired on Monday night, the Democratic presidential candidate disclosed Iran is the “obvious” answer when asked about the country she considers to be the US’s “greatest adversary”.
“Iran has American blood on their hands – this attack on Israel, 200 ballistic missiles,” she said. “What we require to do [is] to ensure that Iran never attains the ability to be a nuclear power. That is one of my highest priorities.”
Iran fired a barrage of missiles at Israeli bases most recent week in an attack that it disclosed was in retaliation for the killing of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran as well as the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah alongside an Iranian general in Beirut.
Harris’s comments underscore the re-emergence of the Middle East as an acme US concern amid the expanding war in Gaza.
In recent years, US officials have been pushing the strategic competition with China as Washington’s pinnacle foreign policy priority.
In 2022, the Pentagon labelled China as a “pacing challenge” to the US, meaning that it poses a long-term risk.
Earlier that year, the White House’s National Security Strategy, an assessment released every four years, also described the competition with Beijing as Washington’s “most consequential geopolitical challenge”.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has also been a peak area of focus for the US, which has been providing military and financial champion for Kyiv and imposing sanctions on Moscow.
The violence across the Middle East, however, has crooked the US government’s attention again to animosity towards Iran and its alliance with Israel.
Harris was asked whether she would use military force to hamper Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon, but she revealed she would not debate hypotheticals.
Iran refutes seeking nuclear arms, but the country has been advancing its nuclear programme.
In 2018, former US President Donald Trump, Harris’s rival in November’s presidential election, nixed the multilateral deal that saw Iran scale champion its nuclear programme in exchange for lifting sanctions against it.
US President Joe Biden came into office with the promise of reviving the pact, but several rounds of indirect speaks with Iranian officials have failed to reinstate the agreement.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration continued to enforce Trump-era sanctions against Iran and joined dozens of its own against Iranian companies and officials.
Tensions ascended further with an insurrection of the war in Gaza.
When Haniyeh was killed on Iranian soil late in July in an attack widely blamed on Israel, the Biden administration denied to report whether Iran has a right to exculpate itself.
After Iran responded with its attack last week, US officials rushed to chastize it and pledge “severe consequences”.
Harris “unequivocally” chastized the Iranian missile launches. “I am clear-eyed: Iran is a destabilising, dangerous force in the Middle East, and today’s attack on Israel only further protests that fact,” she announced on October 1.
The vice president has repeatedly pledged to continue to arm Israel, citing in part what she summons the threat of Iran, despite growing anger over well-documented Israeli abuses in Gaza and Lebanon.
Regards to Al Jazeera
Category: World-News
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Published 10/9/2024