President Barack Obama “broke every rule of negotiation” in brokering the Iran Deal, Carly Fiorina said, and regardless of what Congress decides, “the rest of the world has moved on” with its implementation.
But as president, she said she’d implement a “new deal,” cutting off the flow of money to Iran.
“Even if Congress votes this deal down, and I sincerely hope they will, the rest of the world has moved on in terms of the money flow,” she told NBC’s Chuck Todd in an interview that aired Sunday on “Meet the Press.”
“[China and Russia] have wanted, for a very long time, to open the Iranian economy. They're in there. So are the Europeans. So we must cut off the money flow.”
In a line that's becoming a favorite of hers after it was well-received during the first GOP primary debate, Fiorina said that her first two phone calls as president would be to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “to assure him we stand” with Israel, and to the leader of Iran to tell him, “I don’t care what your deal was. Here’s the new deal.”
“The new deal will be this: the United States of America will make it as difficult as possible for you to move money around the global financial system unless and until you open every military and every nuclear facility to real, anytime, anywhere inspections,” Fiorina added.
She faulted Obama’s negotiating for saddling the U.S. with a deal she said was “not in our interests,” and echoed another prominent business leader in the GOP field for president — Donald Trump — in suggesting she could have done it better.
“I've never negotiated a nuclear deal, but I negotiate a lot of really big deals. And there are some cardinal rules,” Fiorina said.
“Number one: Know with your goals are and stick to them. President Obama laid out a set of goals and rolled on every one. Number two: Walk away from the table. Because if you don't walk away, no one will believe you're serious,” she added, noting her own rule is to walk away “three times.”
Rule number three, Fiorina said, is “never celebrate a deal until you have the deal you want,” and Obama broke that by announcing the deal in the Rose Garden before it was passed or finalized.
Fiorina suggested she’d also put the negotiation skills she cultivated as the head of one of the world’s largest technology companies to work in combating ISIS, telling Todd she’d “hold a Camp David summit immediately and ask all of our Sunni/Arab allies, as well as the Kurds, to attend” as a first move to address the threat.
She said she’d provide bombs to Jordan, intelligence to Egypt and arm the Kurds to help them fight ISIS, and broadly “provide leadership and support” to countries in the Middle East combating the terrorist threat.
But she dismissed the question of whether to send ground troops to fight ISIS as a “false choice,” adding it’s “not necessary” to head into combat yet.
“Obama's always giving us this false choice. Which is, ‘If you don't agree with what I'm doing or not doing, the only option is thousands of ground troops,’” she said. Thousands of ground troops are not necessary at this point. What is necessary is more effective training.”
Fiorina did offer an aggressive stance towards China, however, saying she’d “be applying” pressure to the country while their economy is struggling to ensure “that China does not control the South China trade route.' And she said her one area of agreement with Obama is that the U.S. should in fact respond to China’s hacking attempts on the U.S.
“I do not agree with what he's done to ensure we're not hacked by China. But I do agree that we need an aggressive response to China now that they have hacked into the Office of Personnel Management,” she said.