Rep. Ed Royce (R., Calif.) said new Iranian president Hassan Rowhani's methods mirrored that of North Korea's to get nuclear weapons by wiggling out of international sanctions Tuesday on CNN's The Lead.
"Treasury Department in 2005 put sanctions on North Korea that just brought everything to a halt, and unfortunately, in retrospect, we believed the offer from North Korea that they would come back to the table," he said. "They were desperate to get negotiations started again, but once they got those sanctions lifted, they were able to get the hard currency to finish their nuclear program ... I really think that it was a blunder for the United States not to increase those sanctions and keep them on in North Korea ... I think Rowhani sees an opportunity to stretch this out the same way the North Koreans did."
Calling him a "very clever fellow," Royce discussed Rowhani's past checkered past as Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, during which time he helped advance the country's nuclear capabilities while deceiving the international community:
JAKE TAPPER: Congressman, what do you make of Rowhani's public relations offensive? He's certainly trying to sound and seem different from Ahmadinejad and his predecessors.
ROYCE: Very clever fellow and certainly took credit during his negotiations with the Europeans. His words were during that process, he was able to stretch out the negotiations and get the centrifuges spinning, get them online. So today, you've got four times as many and they're spinning four times as fast because they're much more advanced, and he takes credit for doing that. So I think that's been his past policy. What we need to do is make it very clear that we're wise to that. We know he's playing the same playbook that North Korea used to get nuclear weapons, to get out from under the sanctions, so we just need to basically say, 'Look, we'll give you 100 days from the day you came into office, give up your weapons program, stop enrichment, turn the enriched uranium back and we'll lift the sanctions.' But we have to see that action. We can't let him play us the way he played the Europeans in the negotiations as he brought the centrifuges online.
TAPPER: When you refer to the North Korean playbook, you mean you think he's going to talk a good game, convince the West and the U.S. to give up these sanctions, to drop some of these sanctions, and then he will go full steam ahead into a nuclear weapons program?
ROYCE: That's right. Treasury Department in 2005 put sanctions on North Korea that just brought everything to a halt, and unfortunately, in retrospect, we believed the offer from North Korea that they would come back to the table. They were desperate to get negotiations started again, but once they got those sanctions lifted, they were able to get the hard currency to finish their nuclear program and then from there, they had the weapons they needed. I really think that it was a blunder for the United States not to increase those sanctions and keep them on in North Korea, and I think he saw that, and saw an opportunity. I think Rowhani sees an opportunity to stretch this out the same way the North Koreans did, without the type of debilitating sanctions that we can impose, and the bill that we just passed out of the House over a month ago that's in the Senate truly would bring that economy to a halt. Given what's at stake, given the fact that they're working on three stage ICBMs, miniaturization of their nuclear warhead, and preparing this, you know, enriched uranium for a weapon, I think we need to make it very, very clear.