H. R. McMaster
H. R. McMasterReuters

US President Donald Trump’s former National Security Adviser, Gen. H.R. McMaster, warned in an interview with Fox News that Israel could attack Iran if it detected a threat from it, even in the final days of the Trump administration.

McMaster said in the interview that Israel follows the Begin Doctrine "which means that they will not accept a hostile state having the most destructive weapons on Earth."

The “Begin Doctrine” is named for former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who in 1981 gave the green light for an Israeli strike on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq.

McMaster also referenced Israel's 2007 strikes on a nuclear weapons facility in Syria.

“[W]e are back to kind of the 2006 period, when we knew that Iran was pursuing this threshold nuclear weapons capability, and tensions were higher, and the IDF was about to act at that point,” he said. “This is, I think, one of the reasons, because of the increasing tension, that Iran said, oh, yes, I’d like to negotiate now, because the sanctions against Iran were starting to bite against them, and the Israeli Defense Force, I think, was considering action.”

McMaster also warned President-elect Joe Biden against rejoining the 2015 Iran nuclear deal once he takes office.

Trump withdrew from the agreement in May of 2018 and reimposed sanctions on Iran, but Biden has indicated he would seek to rejoin the agreement.

McMaster said that the 2015 deal forged with the Tehran regime by then-Secretary of State John Kerry failed to consider the "hostile ideology" of the Iranian government and the 40 years of proxy wars Iran has fought against America.

"These big payoffs to Iran when the deal was signed, as well as the relief of sanctions ... what did they do with that money?" McMaster asked rhetorically. "They applied that money to intensify sectarian violence across the region in an effort to put a proxy army on the border of Israel."

"It would be a really big mistake to turn the clock back to 2016 and resurrect the nuclear deal," he added. "The Iran nuclear deal was a political disaster masquerading as a diplomatic triumph."