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WASHINGTON – The Trump administration announced on Friday that it was exonerating eight countries from the severe sanctions that the US was imposing on Iran, undermining its promise to economically punish Tehran's regional aggression while deepening a deep rift with its allies European.
Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, did not identify the eight countries with a six-month waiver, but a senior official confirmed that they include India, South Korea, Japan and China – among the largest importers of Iranian oil.
Mr Pompeo said that the European Union, which had recently announced the creation of an economic channel to continue financial transactions with Iran, was not among the beneficiaries of waivers.
The sanctions were promised in May, when President Trump announced that the US was pulling out of an agreement reached in 2015 with the world powers to curtail the Iranian nuclear program.
They were confirmed Friday, on the eve of November 5, the long-awaited deadline, for countries to stop importing Iranian products or be subject to financial sanctions, and several days before the crucial mid-term elections. during which the Trump government seeks to galvanize Republicans foreign policy badped.
Mr Pompeo said the exemptions were granted to the eight countries "only because they had demonstrated significant reductions in their crude oil and cooperation on many other fronts". He said that two of the eight countries should stop importing Iranian oil "in a few weeks", "And all must submit a new application for extended exemption after six months.
South Korea and China are key to keeping the pressure on North Korea so that it eliminates its nuclear weapons – another major priority of the Trump administration. Once South Korea was exempted, Mr. Trump could not deny the demands of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whom the president has often described as the Asian leader with whom he has the greatest connections.
And India, like China, will probably never stop importing Iranian oil; The waivers help "avoid a potentially very painful confrontation," said Peter Harrell, sanctions expert under the Obama administration. He added that the exemptions also made it possible to control oil prices before the elections on Tuesday.
"What has become of the maximum pressures?" United Against Nuclear Iran, an anti-Iranian group led by former Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, wrote on Twitter in response derogations from the administration. "They gave in. Highligths."
The sanctions – and the lack of exemptions for European allies – threaten to dangerously damage the already tense transatlantic ties. Most major European companies have left Iran in the last few months before the impending sanctions, but European diplomats promised Friday to continue their efforts to protect legitimate trade with Tehran.
"Our collective determination to carry out this work is unshakeable," diplomats from the European Union, Britain, France and Germany said in a statement.
Iran is still part of the nuclear agreement, which it negotiated in 2015 with the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China . International inspectors concluded that Tehran was complying with the agreement by not developing nuclear weapons, and European officials said the agreement was crucial for their national security.
R. Nicholas Burns, one of the leading diplomats in the administration of President George W. Bush, said that imposing sanctions on countries that persevered under an agreement that the United States had helped to negotiate would be a serious mistake.
"We still need these countries on other vital issues, such as containing North Korea and Russia," Burns said.
The sanctions will target more than 700 companies, individuals and other entities involved in the oil, banking, maritime, shipbuilding and insurance sectors in Iran. They will come into effect on Monday and have been announced jointly by Mr. Pompeo and Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury.
Since the United States abandoned the nuclear deal, the Iranian currency, the rial, has lost more than two-thirds of its value, according to officials and experts, and the country's oil exports plunged 2.5 million barrels a day to 1.5 million barrels.
The sanctions are aimed at forcing Tehran to put an end to what the United States considers to be Iran's destabilizing activities in the Middle East, including its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The sanctions are aimed at "depriving the regime of the revenues that it uses to spread death and destruction around the world," said Pompeo.
Shortly after the announcement of new sanctions against Iran – and waivers – Mr. Trump tweeted a poster of himself with the words "Sanctions Are Coming", using the font from the HBO "Game of Thrones" show. The words are a game on a well-known phrase from the show, "Winter is Coming", which refers to an imminent freeze when an army of magical warriors will come down from the north to wipe out all the kingdoms .
Richard Nephew, a senior sanctions official under the Obama administration, described Trump's tweet as "frankly disgusting" because of the economic pain that sanctions impose on the Iranian public.
"Take this seriously, please," Mr. Nephew tweeted back.
Iran's leaders insisted that they did not intend to reward Mr. Trump's decision to abandon the nuclear agreement by acceding to his demands or even by opening a dialogue; this week alone, the Danish authorities accused Iran of attempting to badbadinate an Arab separatist leader living in Denmark.
In one tweet last monthIran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has called American sanctions against his country "total disregard for the rule of law and the human rights of an entire people". ".
We do not know if Tehran will be able to hold out while its economy suffers. Iran has undertaken some of its most aggressive regional actions during the previous round of punitive sanctions between 2012 and 2015.
Spontaneous demonstrations in Iran have erupted in recent weeks in groups that have long been trusted supporters of the Islamic Republic, and public opinion may also have turned against the government's relative moderates. Iran's president, Hbadan Rouhani, had advocated the nuclear deal as a way to improve his country's economy.
The latest sanctions are the second and last round of sanctions that were suspended under the 2015 agreement. The first round was reimposed in August and was targeting transactions with Iran involving banknotes in US dollars, gold, precious metals, aluminum, steel, commercial aircraft and coal.
Mr Mnuchin defended the decision of the administration not to directly impose sanctions on the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a financial messaging service based in Belgium known as Swift. The Conservatives insisted that Swift be punished for failing to expel Iranian banks from his network.
"We intend to remove the designated entities as before," said Mnuchin about Swift.
Mr. Pompeo said that the eight countries to which waivers were granted will pay Iranian oil exclusively through a barter system. Iran must be paid in goods rather than cash to limit its ability to use oil sales to finance its military activities.
Mr. Pompeo also said the list of waivers was much smaller than the 20 countries exempted from US sanctions under President Barack Obama.
Peace groups have denounced the sanctions as "the last step in a calculated campaign of this White House to provoke war with Iran," said Paul Kawika Martin, of Peace Action.
Friday's announcement is part of Trump's enthusiastic efforts to use binding economic tools, including tariffs and sanctions, to promote his foreign policy objectives. But US sanctions against Russia, Venezuela and North Korea have so far produced only few tangible victories.
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