Pompeo urges fresh thinking on Mideast, warns Iran

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has told the UN Security Council that greater cooperation and "fresh thinking to solve old problems" are needed in the Middle East but he also condemned Iran and its proxies for continuing "to foment terror and unrest" in the region.

America's top diplomat said "time is running short" to keep a UN arms embargo on Iran and a travel ban on the head of the country's elite Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, warning that ending such sanctions will "create new turmoil" by the country's "terror regime." The embargo and ban expire in October 2020.

"Failing to confront the Iranian regime's malign activities will only grow the regime's multi-continental body count spanning the last 40 years," he warned.

Pompeo was one of more than 30 speakers at a Security Council meeting about the complex challenges confronting the Middle East. He faced sharp criticism from Russia and Iran, and milder criticism over Trump administration policies from several Western allies.

Pompeo began by touting the Trump administration's accomplishments related to "reviving America's leadership role" in the region.

These included helping to dismantle the Islamic State extremist group's "physical caliphate" which once spanned large areas in Iraq and Syria, helping the UN envoy bring peace to Yemen, and facilitating new links between Israel and its Arab neighbours.

Pompeo then called for more to be done to tackle the challenges facing the Middle East from raging conflict in Libya and continuing violence in Syria to the rift among Gulf countries and Iran, which he described as "the greatest ongoing threat to peace and security in the region."
"Clearly, from Aleppo to Aden, from Tripoli to Tehran, greater cooperation in the Middle East is needed more than ever," Pompeo said. "We need fresh thinking to solve old problems."
Russia's deputy UN ambassador Dmitry Polyansky called the Warsaw Process, which Moscow boycotted, "another attempt to impose a unilateral solution to advance parochial geopolitical agendas."
Speaking directly to Pompeo, he said the secretary of state's speech contained many negative words, only made one reference to cooperation and "not once did you use the word dialogue."
As a result of the military build-up in the region, he said, any incident can spark a conflict "with potentially devastating consequences."
And he appealed to all parties to exercise restraint, settle problems politically and diplomatically, and "eschew ultimatums, sanctions and threats."
Polyansky said the United States can't expect Iran to sit down for negotiations without preconditions when its calls for talks "are punctuated with direct provocations and demeaning sanctions."
Almost all of the 41 military installations in the Mideast in 2018 up from four in 1990 are American, he said, and "the unbridled flow of American weaponry into this region has turned it into a powder keg."
Responding to Pompeo's call for other nations to join the US, Britain and Bahrain in ensuring freedom of navigation in the Gulf, Ravanchi called any interference in the strategic waterway "destabilising," ''unacceptable," and doomed to "fail."
Britain's UN Ambassador Karen Pierce said, "This may well ... be an idea whose time is yet to come, not least because the region itself needs to be ready for such work."