President Trump has directed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to go to the United Nations on Thursday in the first step toward reimposing all U.N. sanctions against Iran, using a legal maneuver that most of the Security Council considers dubious. In announcing Pompeo’s task, Trump said his decision in 2018 to abandon the landmark deal struck with Iran during the Obama administration had made the world safer. “Two years ago, I withdrew the United States from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, which was a product of the Obama-Biden foreign policy failure, a failure like few people have seen in terms of the amount of money we paid for absolutely nothing in a short-term deal,” Trump said.

“I won’t say anything because I don’t like saying it, but Iran doesn’t have so much money to give to the world anymore — to the terrorists, to give to al-Qaeda, various other groups of people that they were funding.”President Trump takes questions during a news conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington on Aug. 19. (Tom Brenner/Reuters)

The move represents a second diplomatic shot after the Security Council roundly rejected a U.S. proposal last week to extend an arms embargo, another part of the nuclear agreement. Only the Dominican Republic voted with the United States, while 11 of the 15 members abstained. Among them were France, Britain and Germany, all of which co-negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran and oppose escalating sanctions.

Now, the Trump administration is relying on a State Department legal opinion that the United States still has authority to invoke the snapback provision because it was a “participant state” in the original agreement. The agreement itself does not address whether a signatory loses its privileges if it withdraws.

Pompeo is undeterred, believing that the rest of the world will abide by the U.N. sanctions, which the Security Council lifted more than four years ago and would return if the Security Council does nothing. “We have every expectation that they’ll be enforced just like every other U.N. Security Council resolution that is in place,” he told reporters in a news conference Wednesday. “The enforcement mechanisms will be just the same enforcement mechanisms we have for all of the U.N. Security Council resolutions,” he added.