"Iran is the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism and is responsible for intensifying multiple conflicts and undermining USA interests in countries such as Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon, and continuing to support attacks against Israel".
North Korea said it may test missiles on a weekly basis, and warned of "all-out war" if the U.S. takes military action. "The Trump administration has no intention of passing the buck to a future administration on Iran", he said at a hurriedly convened press briefing yesterday.
He dismissed the agreement as a short-term effort to "buy off a power who has nuclear ambitions" that would backfire in the long term, the kind of approach that he said failed with Pyongyang. He also said that the Trump administration launched a review of its policy toward Tehran.
According to one Trump administration official, acknowledging Iran's compliance with the narrow provisions of the deal is not the same as denying the regime could be acting badly.
The nuclear agreement, negotiated during Barack Obama's presidency, placed limitations on Iran's nuclear programme in exchange for lifting economic sanctions against Iran.
Tillerson, seeking to reinforce the idea that the USA is forcefully countering Iran's destabilising behaviour in the Middle East, also described Tehran as a "leading state sponsor of terror".
Indeed, "an unchecked Iran has the potential to travel the same path as North Korea", he said.
On Wednesday, Mr Tillerson repeated the Trump administration's view that "strategic patience is a failed approach".
"Iran remains a leading state sponsor of terror, through many platforms and methods", Tillerson wrote.
However, the USA admits that Tehran is complying with the 2015 agreement.
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President Donald Trump ordered the review to see whether suspension of sanctions related to the nuclear deal was "vital to the national security interests of the United States".
He had said in January of 2016 after the deal was implemented that "Iran will not get its hands on a nuclear bomb".
In a letter to US House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, released late on Tuesday, Tillerson declared that Iran was meeting its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal but there were concerns about Tehran's role as a state sponsor of terrorism.
On the campaign trail and since taking office, Trump has repeatedly criticized the deal.
However, his predecessor Barack Obama argued the deal, between Iran and six world powers including China, Russia and the United Kingdom, was the best way to prevent Iran getting a nuclear weapon.
The next test of Trump's attitude toward the nuclear deal will be in May when he must decide whether to extend sanctions waivers for Iran first signed by President Barack Obama.
Tillerson said one of the mistakes in the way the agreement was put together was that it ignored all the other serious threats Iran posed outside of its nuclear programme.
The two issues are not linked under the deal - and if the USA were to reinstate sanctions over Iran's alleged ties to terrorism, the United States would be in violation of the deal.
The deal's critics, though, say it fails to achieve even that goal because key restrictions on Iran's nuclear development end after a decade or more.
This is published unedited from the PTI feed.
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