Boehner to Obama: If Iran talks fail, sanctions will come

US House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner has vowed to impose more sanctions on Iran should President Barack Obama fails to reach an agreement over Tehran's nuclear energy program.

I an interview with CNN on Sunday, Boehner, a Republican from Ohio, said, "The sanctions are going to come, and they're going to come quick.”

Officials from Iran and the P5+1 –  the US, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany – are engaged in intense negotiations to reach a comprehensive deal on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program as a self-imposed end-March deadline for reaching a mutual understanding over the outstanding issues approaches. The two sides have set July 1 as the deadline for a final agreement.

Boehner said if talks collapse, he would move “very, very, very quickly” to bring additional sanctions against Iran.

"Frankly, we should have kept the sanctions in place so that we could have gotten to a real agreement," Boehner said, adding that he has "serious doubts" about the negotiations.

Republican lawmakers in the US Congress have been attempting to frustrate the Obama administration’s efforts to strike a deal with Iran over its civilian nuclear program, with some pushing a new round of economic sanctions against Tehran.

In a bizarre move on March 9, a group of 47 Republican senators sent a letter to Iran, warning that whatever agreement reached with Obama would be a “mere executive agreement” that could be revoked “with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”

Earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress, where he ranted for nearly 40 minutes against the Iran talks, warning Washington that it was negotiating a “bad deal” with the Islamic Republic.

The invitation to Netanyahu was extended by Boehner without consultation with the White House, drawing angry reaction from the Obama administration, which called it a breach of protocol. 

Republican lawmakers are scared that peace might break out between Iran and the United States, challenging those groups that have a vested interest in escalating tensions against the Islamic Republic, American political commentator and antiwar activist Brian Becker told Press TV on Friday.

“If the United States and Iran were to establish a new relationship, based on a recognition that increased hostility or war is against the interests of both countries…that would pose a threat, one to the status of Israel, as a needed extension of American military power in this geo-strategically important resource-rich part of the world, and secondly it would be a blow to the military-industrial complex in America which makes a trillion dollar each and every year because of war or the threat of war,” Becker said.