#twill #tcot #sbalich #maga #leadright #IMF #Iran @danproft @tomilahren
By: Nikki Haley
When I served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, I made it clear that the American people expect the institution to uphold its founding ideals, and to hold irresponsible regimes accountable for their actions. That was badly needed in the cases of Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela, among others.
The same is true with the rest of the multilateral system. Our country helped establish that system after the Second World War, and we remain by far the world’s largest funder of it today. We need to examine closely whether we are getting a decent return on our investment.
The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare that many international bodies are still willing to do the bidding of some of the world’s most dangerous nations — including Iran. This is unacceptable, and it demands a swift and strong response from the United States.
The International Monetary Fund, a U.N. subsidiary and the world’s premier global financial body, has been quietly looking for ways to undermine U.S. sanctions against Iran. It is even mulling a multibillion-dollar loan to the regime. Such a move would prop up the world’s largest sponsor of terror and provide it with billions of dollars that it would use to oppress its people and threaten the U.S. and our allies across the Middle East.
The Trump administration must stop an IMF loan — period. While Iran and its enablers will claim that it needs the money to recover from the economic devastation caused by the coronavirus, the fact is the regime is already capable of providing for its citizens.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could easily tap into the funds under his control worth more than $200 billion, as well as Iran’s sovereign-wealth fund. Similarly, if the regime ended its support for Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and the barbaric Assad regime in Syria, billions more would be freed up.
It says everything we need to know that the regime refuses to take these steps. In fact, Tehran has a long and terrible history of prioritizing funding for its terrorist proxies over providing for the Iranian people.
In 2019, Iran drained nearly $2.5 billion from its sovereign-wealth fund, the National Development Fund, for increased defense spending and, less than a year later, tapped an additional $1.5 billion from the fund to support military operations. Khamenei has also more than doubled the funding for the Basij, the regime’s brute squad responsible for killing around 1,500 Iranians during the November 2019 protests. And last year, Iran claimed nearly one billion Euros intended for medical supplies “disappeared.” You can bet the money didn’t go toward saving lives but taking them across the region and beyond.
Given this history, any IMF loan would be the definition of naive. It would require willful ignorance of Iran’s past and current actions, to say nothing of the murderous character of the regime’s rulers. It would reward not just bad behavior, but truly evil acts. Ultimately, it would only further enable the Ayatollah’s oppression at home and aggression abroad.
The U.S. should publicly warn the IMF that we will not accept its making any loan to Iran. And as the IMF’s largest stakeholder, we should ensure that no loan gets made. We have the facts on our side. Just as the billions in cash the Obama administration delivered to the Iranian regime in 2016 was used to finance wars and terrorism, IMF funds are sure to be used in the same manner. The answer to Iran’s very real problems isn’t to lift sanctions and give it a bailout — it is to demand that Iran change its monstrous behavior.
The U.S. helped found the U.N. and the multilateral system that surrounds it to foster peace, security, and prosperity. The recent actions by the IMF undermine those worthy goals. The U.S. should continue to demand reforms, the stronger the better. We must ensure that taxpayer dollars aren’t wasted, and above all, that America’s interests and national security are protected.
