Iran could be an even bigger threat than North Korea and Kim Jong-un within five years time, a Republican congressman has claimed as quoted by Fox News. Ron DeSantis, a Republican representative for Florida, claimed that if the same path is followed, Iran will become a bigger threat than North Korea within five years.
“I think, as tough as the North Korea situation is right now, five to 10 years down the road, on the current course with this Iran deal, I think we’re going to be in an even more difficult situation with the regime in Tehran and their pursuit of nuclear weapons,” he said.
The warning from DeSantis comes as the threat of a war with North Korea has increased as Kim Jong-un accelerates his nuclear testing, which has lead to World War 3 fears. President is in China as part of his 12-day East Asia tour, in which Trump aims to present a united front to stand up against the hermit kingdom’s brutal dictator. Speaking on his tour, Trump said:
“The world cannot tolerate the menace of a rogue regime that threatens it with nuclear devastation. All responsible nations must join forces to isolate the brutal regime of North Korea-to deny it any form of support.”
The U.S. President Donald Trump has stressed that the Iran nuclear agreement needs reform, and endangered the 2015 deal. He broke ranks with major powers last month refusing to formally certify Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal, meaning most sanctions on Iran were lifted in exchange for Tehran curbing its nuclear work. Trump labelled Iranian leaders “great negotiators” who “negotiated a great deal for themselves, but a “horrible deal for the U.S.”
But with sanctions and rhetoric, President Trump may be pushing North Korea and Iran closer together. On Wednesday, while in Seoul on his Asia tour, three U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups displayed military strength nearby, while Trump gave dire warnings to North Korea’s leader to abandon nuclear weapons.
“Do not underestimate us, and do not try us. It’s a dangerous game of brinkmanship,” Trump said while addressing the National Assembly.
Experts say that by walking away from the Iran accord while simultaneously trying to coax North Korea back to the negotiating table, the Trump administration doesn’t just risk undermining its own efforts to strike a deal with Kim Jong-un’s regime over its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
The president also risks pushing the two pariah states closer together, potentially rekindling a collaborative military-to-military relationship that reaches back decades and heightening the prospect that ballistic missile and nuclear weapons technologies will proliferate. It is a relationship former President George W. Bush coined “the axis of evil.” This scenario is neither far-fetched nor far off, says Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in California.
“If we walk away from this deal with the Iranians, they can do everything North Koreans have done and more. And they can do it much, much faster,” he says.
While the opaque nature of the Iranian and North Korean regimes makes it difficult for Western analysts to monitor the relationship between them, military ties between the two states go back as far as the 1980s. As the two nations pursued their own ballistic missile programs independently, they also shared technical information and know-how. High-ranking Iranian scientists and military officers have reportedly attended and observed many of North Korea’s missile and nuclear tests over the past two decades, underscoring the two regimes’ continued military ties.
“I suspect when you see high-ranking Iranian officials at a military parade in Pyongyang, or at missile test exercises, they’re not there for the Korean food,” says Tom Karako, senior fellow and director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.