“We are not interested in... military conflict against Iran, we have enhanced our forces’ postures in the region for purely defensive purposes,” Brian Hook told journalists in Kuwait City.
Hook said his talks in Kuwait focused on “how to de-escalate tensions and that the region have been driven by Iran and we discussed how we can deepen our cooperation especially around the area of maritime security.”
“The Iranian regime is a threat to freedom of navigation and all nations of the world share an interest in the free flow of commerce and there is much work to be done together,” he said.
“We need Iran to behave more like a normal nation and less like a revolutionary cause. And if we can imagine a peaceful Iran, then we can imagine a peaceful Middle East,” he added.
Hook, on Saturday told CNBC that the U.S. is going to increase sanctions on Iran.
“We are going to increase our sanctions on Iran and continue our foreign policy,” Hook told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble in Abu Dhabi on Saturday.
Hook said a lot of pressure is needed in order to address Iran’s “regional aggression” and a new foreign policy devised by the U.S. aims to bring Iran back to the negotiating table.
“When the President (Trump) got out of the Iran deal, we put a new foreign policy that does a couple of things. It is going to deny the regime the revenue that it needs to run a violent and expansionist foreign policy. But it is also designed to bring them back to the negotiating table,” Hook said.
“So ultimately we would like to have a new deal that addresses Iran’s regional aggression, the missile program and its nuclear program. In order to do that, it is going to take pressure. And in order to get Iran to change its behavior, it is going to take a lot of pressure. So we are going to increase our sanctions on Iran, we are going to continue with this foreign policy,” he added.
Hook said: “We don’t ever preview our sanctions because that’s part of our strategy. When we go after assets, we don’t want to give them time to hide that or create workarounds.”
“But I can say that when you look at Iran’s largest sources of export revenues - it’s oil, petrochemicals, precious metals and industrial metals. We have now sanctioned all four of those categories. We have blacklisted over 70 Iranian banks that the Swift financial system also matched our sanctions. We have collapsed foreign direct investment. We are driving up the cost of the Iranian regime for behaving the way it does.”
On Friday in Saudi Arabia, the vocal US envoy said Iran has no right to respond to diplomacy “with military force,” a day after Tehran shot down a US reconnaissance drone over the Strait of Hormuz — a strategic waterway for the world’s oil transits.
Iran insisted that the US spy Drone entered its air space and after the drone failed to heed the two warnings, it was intercepted.
United States announced in mid June the deployment of 1,000 additional troops to the Middle East to counter any Iranian threats as the US president said his counter is cocked and loaded to respond to any attack by Iran.
President Trump said the U.S. was “cocked and loaded to retaliate” against Iran on Thursday, but he changed his mind 10 minutes before planned strikes.
Attacks against Iran had been planned against three sites in response to the downing of a U.S. Global Hawk drone.
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