President-elect Donald Trump's pick for national security advisor credited Israel with weakening their mutual Mideast foe Iran by devastating its armed allies in the region and promised a muscular new US approach against the Islamic Republic.
"We have to give credit where credit's due, and that's Bibi Netanyahu in Israel," President-elect Donald Trump's pick for national security advisor Mike Waltz told Fox News on Wednesday, referring to the Israeli Prime Minister.
"(Israel has) taken down the tentacles of the octopus, so to speak: Hamas, Hezbollah, some of the militias in in Syria. Iran has been so weakened that it made Assad so weak that clearly the HTS, Turkey and others saw opportunity," he added, referring to the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham radical Islamist group leading the Syrian rebels.
Waltz lamented the extension last month of a US sanctions waiver for Iran's transfer of electricity to neighboring Iraq, but did not explicitly commit to ending the policy beyond saying Iraq needed to wean itself off its neighbor's supplies.
The Trump administration will work to put greater strain on Iran's economy through sanctions, Waltz added, and would revive the so-called maximum pressure campaign imposed during Trump's first term.
"You're going to see a huge shift on Iran. We have to constrain their cash. We have to constrain their oil. We have to go back to maximum pressure ... which was working under the first Trump administration."
Channeling comments by Trump on the campaign trail, Waltz said the new administration would stop short of any military adventure to unseat Iran's rulers.
"I think the President has been crystal clear on, and his mandate from the voters was to do everything he can to avoid us getting drug into more Middle East wars."
