The United States on Monday restored sanctions targeting Iran’s oil, banking and transportation sectors and threatened more action to stop its “outlaw” policies, steps the Islamic Republic called economic warfare and vowed to defy. The measures are part of a wider effort by U.S. President Donald Trump to curb Tehran’s missile and nuclear programs and diminish the Islamic Republic’s influence in the Middle East, notably its support for proxies in Syria, Yemen and Lebanon.
Trump’s moves target Iran’s main source of revenue – its oil exports – as well as its financial sector, essentially making 50 Iranian banks and their subsidiaries off limits to foreign banks on pain of losing access to the U.S. financial system. The return of the sanctions was triggered by Trump’s May 8 decision to abandon the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, negotiated with five other world powers during Democratic President Barack Obama’s administration. That agreement had removed many U.S. and other economic sanctions from Iran in return for Tehran’s commitment to curtail its nuclear program.
Trump denounced the deal because of time limits on some of Iran’s nuclear activities, as well as for its failure to address other Iranian activity that the United States does not like. In abandoning the agreement and imposing sanctions that it had lifted as well as adding new ones, the United States is betting the economic pressure will force Iran to change its behavior and agree to a new, much more restrictive deal.
Some analysts are skeptical Iran will knuckle under to U.S. pressure, at least in the short term. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said U.S. “bullying” was backfiring by making Washington more isolated, a reference to other world powers opposed to the initiative. The other parties to the 2015 nuclear deal, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia, have said they will stay in it. European powers that continue to back the nuclear deal said they opposed the reapplication of sanctions and major oil buyer China said it regretted the move.
