Uber-hawk White House national security advisor John Bolton took on the tricky issue of what strangling the Iranian economy could mean to Iran’s poor neighbour Armenia when speaking to journalists on October 25 during his visit to Yerevan.
However, from his reported remarks, it is not clear what stance Washington seriously expects small, impoverished Armenia to take towards continuing business with Iran during the US sanctions assault on the Islamic Republic.
Bolton vowed that President Donald Trump's administration would "squeeze Iran" with maximum economic pressure in response to Tehran's "malign" behaviour in the Middle East and around the world, when interviewed by RFE/RL after he had met Armenian Acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian.
"As I explained to the prime minister, we want to put maximum pressure on Iran because it has not given up the pursuit of nuclear weapons," Bolton told the media outlet’s Armenian service. "It remains the world’s central banker of international terrorism. And we’re concerned about its ballistic-missile programmes and its active conventional military operations in Syria and Iraq and elsewhere."
He was also cited as saying that that's why he "stressed" to Pashinian, in advance, that the Trump administration is "going to enforce these sanctions very vigorously" and that the Armenian-Iranian border is "going to be a significant issue".