On November 5, President Trump continued his plan to reintroduce sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran after withdrawing the United States from the 2015 Iranian nuclear agreement.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on USA Today: “Our goal is to stress the Iranian regime on the revenues it uses to finance violent and destabilizing activities across the Middle East and, indeed, around the world. The Iranian regime has a choice: it can make a 180 degree turn from its outlaw line of action and behave like a normal country, the alternative is to see its economy collapse. "
The sanctions imposed on Iran are quite significant: 400 targets in the shipping and energy sector, 50 banks and their subsidiaries and 250 legal entities. For a total of 700 entities. The US administration has applied sanctions to over 900 Iranian targets since Trump took office in January 2017. According to the Treasury Department, this is the "highest level of US economic pressure on Iran".
The administration has issued temporary waivers for eight nations - India, China, South Korea, Japan, Italy, Greece, Taiwan and Turkey - which are currently dependent on Iranian oil. But these waivers are only valid for six months and will probably not be renewed. Seven of the eight nations mentioned are Iran's largest crude oil customers. However, since the US withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal and the mere threat of sanctions has already sent the economy of the Islamic Republic into crisis. The short-term extension of these sanctions will not help Iran in the long run. The exemptions are intended to give buying nations time to source oil elsewhere.
Several European nations, China and Russia have declared that they would keep the Iran nuclear deal without the United States. European nations have even pledged to work economically with Iran despite US sanctions. But that little act of defiance of Europe has quickly vanished because European importers cannot afford to turn against the largest trading market on the planet. So Iran is left alone to face what amounts to an almost total economic blackout imposed by the United States.
It is recalled that Iran is extremely dependent on its crude exports and, although Tehran has retained its main energy consumers, the Iranian economy is suffering and causing internal political turmoil.
For its part, Iran considers sanctions as something like an act of war. "We are in a situation of economic war. We are facing an overbearing enemy, "Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said in a televised speech after sanctions were announced by Washington. Rouhani went on to say that Iran must "resist". But its ability to do so will be devolved to other elements of Iranian national power, such as covert operations aimed at undermining US interests in the Middle East.
Some experts fear that a possible counter-move by Iran would lead to another armed conflict in a region that has already witnessed some of the most horrendous fighting since the beginning of the XNUMXst century.
Indeed, Rouhani could straighten the game and speak of US sanctions as an act of economic warfare. Sanctions are simply a contemporary blockade aimed at making a nation change its behavior or weaken it to the point of making the nation give up. The most concrete and recent example is what happened with North Korea.
For Western democracies, sanctions have long been the tool used in place of violent armed conflicts to pacifically influence behavior.
The Iranian behavior of the past and the rise of alleged clandestine acts suggest that Teheran will do more than simply try to overcome this storm. The political issues underlying the economic crisis could prove too difficult to manage, especially in light of the ongoing turmoil within Iran.