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WASHINGTON – The Trump administration restored Friday US sanctions against Iran lifted under the 2015 nuclear deal, but provided exemptions for eight countries still able to import oil from the Islamic Republic without penalty.
The sanctions come into effect Monday and cover the sectors of shipping, finance and energy. This is the second batch that the administration has re-imposed since Mr. Trump retired from the historic agreement in May.
The 2015 agreement, one of the biggest diplomatic successes of former President Barack Obama, granted Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief in exchange for 39, a reduction in his nuclear program, which many believed he was using to develop atomic weapons. Mr. Trump has repeatedly denounced this deal as the "worst" ever negotiated by the United States and said that he had given too much to Iran for too little.
But supporters as well as other parties to the agreement – Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the European Union – vehemently defended it . The Europeans have mobilized to save the deal without the United States, fearing that the new sanctions will lead Iran to withdraw and resume all its nuclear work.
New measures should hit Iranians hard, Elizabeth Palmer of CBS News reported. In Tehran, one man said that the stronger the United States grew, the more people would resist. In a richer region, CBS News met the Hossein family. "I want to escape Iran," said Essam, a disgusted accountant with the US and Iranian governments.
Friday's announcement took place just days before the mid-term congressional elections, allowing Trump to highlight his decision to withdraw from the transaction – a movement that was popular among Republicans. Shortly after the announcement, Mr. Trump tweeted what looks like an image of himself that inspired the TV series "Game of Thrones" with the slogan "Sanctions are Coming, the 5 November".
"Our goal is to force the regime to make a clear choice: abandon its destructive behavior or continue on the path of economic disaster," Trump said in a statement released Friday night.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the sanctions "aim to fundamentally alter the behavior of the Islamic Republic of Iran". He has published a list of 12 demands that Iran must meet to obtain the lifting of sanctions, including the end of its support for terrorism and military engagement in Syria and the halting of the development of nuclear and ballistic missiles.
Pompeo said eight countries would receive temporary waivers allowing them to continue importing Iranian petroleum products while they were preparing to stop these imports. He added that these countries, which would include American allies such as Turkey, Italy, India, Japan and South Korea, had made efforts to eliminate their imports but had not been able to complete their imports. task by Monday.
The waivers will remain valid for six months, during which the importing country may purchase Iranian oil but will have to deposit the Iranian receipts into an escrow account. Iran can spend money, but only for a limited range of humanitarian items.
Pompeo defended the oil exemptions and noted that since May, when the US began to pressure countries to stop buying Iranian oil, Iranian exports had dropped by more than a million barrels a day.
He said the Iranian economy was already in shock from past sanctions, as the currency has lost half of its value since April. The government has ensured that basic services, such as garbage collection, function normally and keep the price of gas at about 90 cents a gallon. But prices in general have skyrocketed, reported Palmer of CBS News. It's for "cheese, butter, jam, meat, chicken, everything," said Reza Eidiyuon, who, like everyone else in Tehran, is worried about the new sanctions imposed by the United States. United.
Some Iranian hawks in Congress and elsewhere have said that Friday's decision should have gone even further. They hoped that Iran would be disconnected from the main international SWIFT financial messaging network.
With few exceptions, sanctions imposed by the United States will hit Iran, countries that do not stop importing Iranian oil companies and foreign companies that deal with Iranian entities listed blacklisted, including its central bank, a number of private financial institutions and state-owned companies. port and shipping companies, as well as hundreds of Iranian officials.
"Our ultimate goal is to force Iran to permanently abandon its well-documented underground activities and behave like a normal country," said Pompeo during a conference call with the Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin.
Mnuchin said 700 additional Iranian businesses and people would be added to the sanctions lists. These, he said, would include more than 300 people who had not been included in the previous sanctions.
On Saturday, on the eve of the anniversary of the takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979, the Iranian Supreme Leader declared that the Islamic Republic was the "victorious party" after nearly 40 years of confrontation in the United States. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that despite the US-led military, economic and propaganda wars against Iran over the past four decades, "the United States is the vanquished camp and the Islamic Republic the party. victorious".
Khamenei said that the United States had failed to dominate Iran as before the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the pro-Western monarchy. He said the United States is weaker than it was in 1979.
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