US Vice President Kamala Harris says Iran is the most significant enemy of the United States, citing Tehran’s recent ballistic missile attack against Israel.
In an interview with the CBS television network aired on Monday night, the Democratic presidential candidate said Iran is the “obvious” answer when asked about the country she considers to be the US’s “greatest adversary”.
“Iran has American blood on their hands – this attack on Israel, 200 ballistic missiles,” she said. “What we need to do [is] to ensure that Iran never achieves the ability to be a nuclear power. That is one of my highest priorities.”
Iran fired a barrage of missiles at Israeli bases last week in an attack that it said was in retaliation for the killing of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran as well as the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah alongside an Iranian general in Beirut.
Harris’s comments underscore the re-emergence of the Middle East as a top US concern amid the expanding war in Gaza.
In recent years, US officials have been pushing the strategic competition with China as Washington’s top foreign policy priority.
In 2022, the Pentagon labelled China as a “pacing challenge” to the US, meaning that it poses a long-term risk.
Earlier that year, the White House’s National Security Strategy, an assessment released every four years, also described the competition with Beijing as Washington’s “most consequential geopolitical challenge”.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has also been a top area of focus for the US, which has been providing military and financial support for Kyiv and imposing sanctions on Moscow.
The violence across the Middle East, however, has turned the US government’s attention again to animosity towards Iran and its alliance with Israel.
Harris was asked whether she would use military force to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, but she said she would not discuss hypotheticals.
Iran denies seeking nuclear arms, but the country has been advancing its nuclear programme.
In 2018, former US President Donald Trump, Harris’s rival in November’s presidential election, nixed the multilateral deal that saw Iran scale back its nuclear programme in exchange for lifting sanctions against it.
US President Joe Biden came into office with the promise of reviving the pact, but several rounds of indirect talks with Iranian officials have failed to reinstate the agreement.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration continued to enforce Trump-era sanctions against Iran and added dozens of its own against Iranian companies and officials.
Tensions escalated further with the outbreak of the war in Gaza.
When Haniyeh was killed on Iranian soil late in July in an attack widely blamed on Israel, the Biden administration declined to say whether Iran has a right to defend itself.
After Iran responded with its attack last week, US officials rushed to condemn it and pledge “severe consequences”.
Harris “unequivocally” denounced the Iranian missile launches. “I am clear-eyed: Iran is a destabilising, dangerous force in the Middle East, and today’s attack on Israel only further demonstrates that fact,” she said on October 1.
The vice president has repeatedly pledged to continue to arm Israel, citing in part what she calls the threat of Iran, despite growing anger over well-documented Israeli abuses in Gaza and Lebanon.
