Iran has been a neighbor for millenia, and will continue to be a neighbor for millenia. We have no issue with seeking to develop the best terms we can with Iran.
Supporters of the national front, Mosaddeq, believe that in Iran, we don't have a nationalities problem, we don't have an ethnic problem. It is like living with your wife, with whom you are in love and you are intensely involved in, but you also have tensions. And their position is that they want to deny that these tensions exist.
What the United States has to do is send a clear message to Iran that they will not be able to develop nuclear weapons. Why endure the difficulty of sanctions if they are not going to be able to develop nuclear weapons anyway?
Iran will for sure have pledged to the international community that it will not develop a nuclear weapon, and now will be subject to an additional protocol, a more vigorous inspection and monitoring regime that lasts in perpetuity.
We've achieved this historic progress through diplomacy, without resorting to another war in the Middle East. I want to also point out that by working with Iran on this nuclear deal, we were better able to address other issues.
Of course we [with Angela Merkel] discussed our commitment to meeting shared security challenges from countering cyber threats to ensuring that Iran continues to live up to the terms of the Iran nuclear deal.
For decades, our differences with Iran meant that our governments almost never spoke to each other. Ultimately, that did not advance America's interests.
We have a historic opportunity to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons in Iran, and to do so peacefully, with the international community firmly behind us. We should seize that chance.
After the revolution of 1979, Iran embarked on a policy of sectarianism. Iran began a policy of expanding its revolution, of interfering with the affairs of its neighbors, a policy of assassinating diplomats and of attacking embassies. Iran is responsible for a number of terrorist attacks in the Kingdom, it is responsible for smuggling explosives and drugs into Saudi Arabia. And Iran is responsible for setting up sectarian militias in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen, whose objective is to destabilize those countries.
The Gulf States are extraordinarily suspicious of Iran for good reason. They view Iran as meddling in their affairs. They have seen Iran level asymmetric attacks against their facilities or their interests.
The bottom line is this - whereas Iran was steadily expanding its nuclear program, we have now cut off every single path that Iran could have used to build a bomb.
We all know a lot of people who died in 9/11, the World Trade Center. A lot of money funding that mission is directly tied - from the 9/11 Commission, directly tied to Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas.