ISLAMABAD: Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said the Trump administration has been unable to conduct the kind of disciplined, technically grounded diplomacy needed for negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program.
She was responding to a question during a recent interview on MSNBC’s talk show Morning Joe.
Clinton said negotiations are a slow, highly specialized process that requires officials with real expertise in nuclear weapons and verification, contrasting that with what she portrayed as the administration’s reliance on a small inner circle to handle several major crises simultaneously.
“When I was Secretary of State, I began secret negotiations with Iran to try to reach a nuclear weapons deal to prevent it from ever having a nuclear arsenal. It was a very slow, deliberative process,” she said.
The former secretary said that the US would need to “bring in people who actually know something about nuclear weapons.”
“We had physicists and nuclear weapons practitioners at the table when our administration was negotiating the Joint Plan of Action [pact with Iran]. You need people who know something and know the history,” she said.
She was sharply critical of the administration’s strategic judgment, saying she was stunned by reports that President Trump had not anticipated Iran could try to close the Strait of Hormuz.
Clinton said that in the military exercises she attended while in government, closing the strait had long been seen as one of the most immediate risks in any confrontation with Tehran.
She said she supported Trump bombing Iran’s nuclear sites in June of last year because she thought that was an appropriate and limited strategic objective. “[But] I opposed his incoherent attack on Iran,” she said.
“I know from personal experience how Netanyahu has tried to get every American president to agree to have an open-ended war with Iran, because I had many hours-long conversations with him and his war cabinet about this and refused to go along with a very inchoate desire to do something to Iran that, you know, with no real end state,” she said.
“I think you've got to get back into hard negotiations with the right people at the table who know what they are doing. And I think you've then got to make it very clear that we want our allies involved. We don't want to be dissing our allies because they have a big stake in this,” she said.
In her interview, Clinton urged Congress to assert its constitutional role and place limits on presidential war-making before lasting damage is done to American authority.
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