Heritage’s Kiron Skinner: Iran Remains a Priority for the U.S., Even Amidst Coronavirus

EXCERPT:

SKINNER: "Actually, it's a continuation of what I’ve called, and others who have studied the U.S.-Iran relationship since the Iranian revolution of 1979. It's a continuation of the twilight war that we have been in with this country. We started the year with Iran as a crisis and it is still a crisis. Coronavirus happened as a major global pandemic in between, but the fact of the matter is Iran remains a high priority to the United States. Those, in fact, are the words of the head of U.S. Central Command, General Kenneth McKenzie, as he outlined the full range of military measures that we are taking against Iran and its proxies. We have loss of American life and that of the British this week, due to Iran. This war continues at a lower grade, it's not a conventional war, using the extensive use of proxies in Iraq and Syria and in Yemen. We have layered issues in terms of our global agenda now. Not just the Coronavirus, but in fact the Iran crisis interacts with Coronavirus virus in the sense that Iran, like China, has lacked transparency and it's shown that it does not have the resiliency within its system to deal with this."