McMaster won't say if Trump will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal

National security adviser H.R. McMaster declined Thursday morning to say whether President Donald Trump plans to withdraw the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal, saying instead that whatever decision the president announces will be part of a larger administration stance toward Iran.

“I’m not saying anything yet about it, but when the announcement is made, it will fit into a fundamentally sound and broad strategy aimed at addressing Iran’s destabilizing behavior and prioritizing protecting American vital interests,” McMaster said on NBC’s “Today” show.


Trump, who has spent the week in New York speaking at and attending meetings on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting, said Wednesday that he had come to a decision on whether the U.S. would remove itself from the Iran deal, but he refused to say what that decision was or when he would announce it. The president railed against the deal, which eased sanctions against the Islamic republic in exchange for concessions on its nuclear program, on the campaign trail but has yet to remove the U.S. from it as he once promised he would.

Although McMaster declined to offer clarity into Trump’s final decision on the nuclear deal, he said it “is accurate” that the president is interested in renegotiating portions of the deal related to its expiration and Iranian ballistic missile programs.

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McMaster said the Trump administration’s approach to Iran would be more holistic, taking into account not only the nuclear deal but also Iran’s “destabilizing activities” in the region. He said the deal had taken up too much of the focus of former President Barack Obama’s administration, at the expense of other issues posed by Iran, including what McMaster labeled a “sophisticated campaign of subversion” by which the Iranians are “creating almost a Hezbollah model across the greater Middle East.”

“It’s really about how our approach to this deal fits into our broader Iran strategy to address what Iran is doing, which is enmeshing the greater Middle East in conflict, helping to perpetuate this, really, humanitarian and political catastrophe from, you know, from Lebanon to Syria to Iraq to Yemen,” the national security adviser said. “What Iran really needs to be is incentivized to stop its destructive behavior across the region that has caused so much human suffering. And so the idea is, our approach has to change fundamentally.”