At a press conference in New Delhi, India on October 25, 2017, US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson responding a question from a reporter on Iran, said: With respect to the recently announced policy of the United States towards Iran, I think it’s important to keep a few things in mind. That policy, as you know, had three important pillars to it. One is dealing with the nuclear plan of action. The second important pillar of that policy, though, is to deal with Iran’s other destabilizing activities – their ballistic missile programs, their export of arms to terrorist organizations and their destabilizing export of foreign fighters, involvement in the revolution in Yemen, Syria, and other places. And the third pillar, though, which, again, doesn’t get talked as much about, is a support for moderate voices inside of Iran, that we know there are strong feelings and values inside of Iran that we want to promote in terms of one day the Iranian people being able to retake control of their government. They live under this oppressive revolutionary regime, and we do not want to harm the Iranian people. Our fight is not with the Iranian people. Our disagreements are with the revolutionary regime.
So with that context, as we are taking actions to impose sanctions on the regime – and, in particular, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard – it’s our objective to deny financing capacity and to disrupt the activities related to these malign behaviors. It’s not our objective to harm the Iranian people, nor is it our objective to interfere with legitimate business activities that are going on with other businesses, whether they be from Europe, India, or agreements that are in place that promote economic development and activity to the benefit of our friends and allies as well. We think that there’s no contradiction within that policy and, in fact, we’re calling on some of these same counterparties to join us in imposing sanctions on Iran’s activities, and in particular, the activities of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and their subsidiaries to punish them for the destabilizing activities that we see Iran carrying out in the region.
So we don’t see a contradiction there and we have very open dialogue and discussions with all of our friends and allies around the policy to ensure it’s well understood. But also, if we see areas of concern, we’ll engage with our friends and partners on ways that we believe they can help put the pressure on Iran to push back on the destabilizing activities of Iran that I think are of a concern to many in the world.