The squatter in the White House was in Europe this week trashing U.S. allies, making gauzy remarks about leaving NATO unless the other members pay a bigger share of the alliance’s costs, politically damaging the British prime minister, lying about what he clearly said in a taped interview, insulting the Queen, lining himself up unequivocally with white nationalists, and intoning “fake news” like a shield that he hopes will magically erase Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s latest indictments and the indictments yet to come. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s top minions were telling Britain, France, and Germany that Washington will not grant exemptions on economic sanctions for companies doing business with Iran.
The rejection of the exemption request is part of the Trump regime’s hard-nosed approach that includes public and behind-the-scenes U.S. advocacy of regime change in Iran. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced last month that he will deliver a major address near Los Angeles on July 22 titled “Supporting Iranian Voices.”
In August and again in November, the U.S. plans to reimpose two waves of sanctions against Tehran. Sanctions were lifted by the Obama administration after the Iran nuclear accord was signed in 2015. A key element of the reimposition is cutting off Iran from access to Western banks. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the accord on May 8.
On Saturday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said: “Today, we are in conditions in which the United States is more isolated than ever over the sanctions issue. America’s illegal actions ... have even isolated it among its own allies as we just saw.”
Certainly the Trump regime has generated a wave of eye-rolling and head-shaking among European leaders. And it’s true that the other signatories to the nuclear accord—China, Russia, and especially Britain, Germany, and France—have sought to keep the multilateral accord alive. But reimposed sanctions without exemptions could make their effort to stick to the accord politically difficult at home.
Dan De Luce, Abigail Williams, and Andrea Mitchell at NBC News report that in a written reply to a request for broad exemptions from sanctions by those three European nations, Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said the U.S. would only grant limited sanctions exemptions on humanitarian and national security grounds.
Their letter noted that the 2015 deal, which lifted sanctions in exchange for limitations on Iran’s nuclear development program, had “failed to guarantee the safety of the American people” and, therefore, the U.S. will place “unprecedented financial pressure on the Iranian regime” through reimposed sanctions until there is a “tangible, demonstrable and sustained shift in the policies we have enumerated.”
The renewed approach on sanctions is designed to crash the Iranian economy and stir additional unrest in the Islamic republic. Trump has said he wants to cut Iran oil exports to zero. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley was in India two weeks ago urging the government there to “rethink” its relations with Iran. India buys most of Iran’s oil exports, and Iran is its third-largest supplier. Additionally, the NBC team reported:
A U.S. delegation held three days of talks in Saudi Arabia this month “to discuss energy, diplomacy, security, and economic pressure” on Iran, the State Department official told reporters.
The official’s comments underscored the rising U.S. tension with Iran. According to a report in Axios, Israel and the United States formed a joint working group in recent months to help support internal opposition to the Tehran regime. And at a press conference in Brussels on Thursday, Trump said that that “there might be an escalation between us and the Iranians.”
And that is exactly what supporters of the Iran accord are afraid of. On Friday, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia wrote in The Atlantic magazine—Don't Let Trump Go to War With Iran:
I fear the United States is on the verge of blundering into another unnecessary war with Iraq’s next-door neighbor Iran. The same warning signs are on the horizon, and I hope we will turn back from the foolish path we seem to be taking. [...]
I hope I am wrong about what I see coming. But watching this administration tear up a diplomatic deal with Iran, use increasingly belligerent rhetoric about that nation, and assert that it can wage war without coming to Congress leads me to sound an alarm. We cannot afford another unnecessary war, and Congress and the public must be vigilant to stop it.
It would be encouraging to believe that Congress really would step in to keep such a war from happening. But in its current configuration, that is a vain hope.