The Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Tugendhat MBE MP, has expressed his view that the “fundamental threat to peace and stability in the Middle East” is Iran and that the UK’s abstention on a US-led resolution to extend the UN arms embargo on Iran was a “mistake”.
In an interview for the Frank Talk podcast, Mr Tugendhat said that the “extraordinary” normalisation of ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and Israel and Bahrain, has “crystallised the reality that… the fundamental threat to peace and stability in the Middle East is not Israel or Palestine – it’s Iran”.
The Conservative MP described the UK’s decision to abstain on a resolution to extend the UN conventional arms embargo on Iran at the UN Security Council in August as a “mistake”, stating that the UK must defend its interests in the region.
In response to reports that Iran has increased its stockpile of low-enriched uranium to more than ten times higher than permitted in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA) nuclear deal, Mr Tugendhat underlined: “It is quite clear to me that the Iranian regime is in breach of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) rules, there’s no great doubt in that… The IAEA have said it themselves”.
He added that “the UK should be looking at the region and deciding first of all, who is in breach of what, and secondly, what are our interests in the region that we must defend”. “Both of them go towards snapback”, he noted, referring to the JCPoA snapback mechanism which can restore previous UN sanctions against Iran.
In the wide-ranging discussion with Christopher Pyne, former Australian Minister of Defence and Michael Danby, former Chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee of the Australian Federal Parliament, Mr Tugendhat condemned Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party: “To have somebody who normalised antisemitism in British political life is frankly hateful… Tolerating antisemitism in our public discourse is unacceptable”.
