Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said Thursday the Obama administration’s talks with Iran over its nuclear arms program shortchanged Western negotiators.
“It’s a terrible deal,” he said on Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show.”
{mosads}Huckabee, a potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate, blasted a tentative outline making the rounds Thursday. A draft nuclear deal leaked then said the U.S. would lift economic sanctions on Tehran if it reduced its nuclear centrifuge supply by 40 percent.
“The thought of giving them 6,000 centrifuges — this is the equivalent of saying, we got a pyromaniac in our neighborhood,” Huckabee said. “We’re not going to let him have a 10-gallon gas can and a book of matches.”
“That way, we’ll just hold him back and he can’t burn as much down,” he continued. “Would anyone in his or her right mind allow that? Of course we wouldn’t.”
Thursday’s potential agreement would freeze Iran’s centrifuge count at 6,000, a drop from its current stock of roughly 10,000. President Obama has said any such bargain must also halt Iran’s nuclear weapons research for at least a decade or more.
Huckabee said Iranian leadership had proven itself untrustworthy on similar arrangements in the past. Thinking otherwise, he argued, was “true insanity.”
“One of the reasons Netanyahu came to the U.S., spoke to Congress and thereby speaking to the American people, was to tell us we can do better than this,” Huckabee said, referencing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s March 3 address to Congress.
“And frankly, to do better means that we make it clear that nuclear options are not viable for Iran,” he added. “Not now, not tomorrow, not ever.”
A group of 47 GOP senators told Iran on March 9 that Congress could void any Iran deal it found lacking. Freshman Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) authored the open letter and sent it to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader.
Secretary of State John Kerry met Iranian officials in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Thursday to wrangle over a tentative bargain. Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia aided the U.S. during the talks.