To be fair, decisions on when to impose sanctions or otherwise aggravate irascible international state actors shouldn’t depend on what the equity market happens to be doing, but the timing of new measures against Iran and Venezuela left something to be desired on Monday.
Amid a mini-crash on Wall Street, the Trump administration rolled out sweeping sanctions aimed at further crippling Iran’s ballistic missile program and undermining its nuclear ambitions. While the risk-off mood in markets wasn’t the product of geopolitical tensions, the announcement from Mike Pompeo certainly didn’t help.
Iran’s missile arsenal is, in fact, formidable, and a legitimate source of concern. The nuclear “threat”, on the other hand, is habitually overstated by The White House in order to justify Trump’s multi-year pressure campaign, which has succeeded in exacerbating local economic suffering and not much else.
Trump did deal a grievous blow to the regime in Tehran in January with the wildly brazen assassination of Qassem Soleimani. That single act (which will echo through history) did far more damage to the regime than any sanctions ever will.
While financially painful, Trump’s sanctions invariably hurt everyday Iranians too, not to mention putting America’s European allies in an extremely awkward position by forcing them to choose between reneging on an international agreement to which Russia and China are both parties, or risk being sanctioned themselves.
Steve Mnuchin was pretty pleased with Monday’s actions. “The Trump Administration remains fully committed to its maximum pressure campaign against the Iranian regime to prevent the production of a nuclear weapon and other malign activities”, he remarked. “The Treasury Department will not hesitate to target anyone who trades conventional arms with Iran, provides support to its nuclear program, or facilitates its development of ballistic missiles”.
That’s latter bit is not entirely true. After all, Russia meets that description and the administration hasn’t exactly been “proactive” when it comes to “targeting” Moscow for its various malign activities across the region, including and especially Vladimir Putin’s support for Bashar al-Assad.
Monday’s announcement comes just days after the US claimed authority to reimpose international penalties on Iran despite having no standing to do so. On Saturday, Pompeo asserted “the return of virtually all previously terminated UN sanctions”, a claim tantamount to declaring the nuclear deal void on behalf of other nations, against those nations’ own wishes.
“Just a day earlier, Britain, France and Germany said in a letter that the sanctions – which the UN had suspended after the signing of a 2015 nuclear accord – would have no legal effect”, The New York Times notes.
Nevertheless, he persisted. “The United States expects all UN Member States to fully comply with their obligations to implement these measures”, Pompeo said, completely ignoring the fact that UN Member States have no such obligations, given that the reimposition of sanctions was a unilateral act.
Then, he threatened everybody: “In the coming days, the United States will announce a range of additional measures to strengthen implementation of UN sanctions and hold violators accountable”.
That’s the context for Monday’s new measures, which implicate a slew of individuals and entities, including three deputy directors of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and “a number” of subsidiaries. Also affected are a handful of companies that supply equipment for the country’s missile program.
In remarks at a press conference, Pompeo said the administration is sanctioning Iran’s Defense ministry and, for good measure, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, ostensibly because he too is providing material support for Tehran’s weapons programs.
“No matter who you are, if you violate the UN arms embargo on Iran, you risk sanctions”, Pompeo went on to say. “Our actions today are a warning that should be heard worldwide”.
Even Wilbur Ross chimed in with new additions to the Entity List. “These five individuals played a critical role in Iran’s nuclear weapons development program and continue to work for the Iranian regime”, he said, of Ahmad Nozad Gholik, Behnam Pouremadi, Hamid Sepehrian, Mojtaba Farhadi Ganjeh, and Sayyed Javad Ahmadi. “Iran must comply with its nuclear safeguard obligations and immediately cooperate with the international community”.
Monday’s actions by the administration shouldn’t be written off as just another episode in Pompeo’s ongoing campaign to bring about regime change in Tehran (because let’s face, that’s the goal here, even if this administration prefers to achieve it through a policy of starvation as opposed to invasion). As described above, the US last week asserted the right to unilaterally reimpose UN sanctions, and Monday’s measures appear designed to back that up. This is brazen even by Pompeo’s standards.
As for Iran itself, the beleaguered nation obviously has no capacity to do anything other than verbally object and perhaps hit back via proxies in Iraq. Of course, that latter option was severely curtailed with Soleimani’s death, and I think that’s a key point that isn’t fully appreciated by the public.
Soleimani was Iran’s operational capabilities. For all the talk about its missile program and nuclear ambitions, Qassem was the country’s most valuable military asset. One man. He was totally autonomous, answering only to God and Khamenei, and he operated with impunity for years.
It wouldn’t be accurate to say that his death “neutralized” the threat from Iran, but it would be entirely fair to say that the regime’s capacity to project influence across the region will never (ever) be the same. Trump killed a ghost, effectively. He executed the executioner. The regime’s lack of follow-through is indicative of an incapacitated military apparatus.
The point: Additional sanctions achieve nothing other than to further alienate America’s allies and add to the suffering of the Iranian people. Trump delivered the knockout punch in January. Now, Pompeo is just kicking the country while it lays dying.
That’s the long and the short of it.
It’s more self-serving political theater by Trump to “look” tough as he sinks in the polls, his legals troubles escalate, and the dead pile up from COVID19. Doesn’t change that he remains a corrupt autocrat to the core: recall Trump defied Congress to push through an arms sale to Saudi Arabia and then fired the OIG officer who started investigating his actions
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https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/18/linick-administration-arms-sales-saudi-arabia-265024
It is more political theatre, indeed. Being sardonic, I can imagine Kushner saying to the parties of the Abraham Accords Peace Agreement that the U.S. will not support their peace unless the administration can have the win, that being more sanctions on Iran. The parties to the Agreement were like “Ok, Ok, Uncle, all right, if you have to have that for us to sign the accord, then yes, we won’t object.” We’ve now gotten our two-bits out of the Agreement.
And there is Elliot Abrams, special architect of blunder Iraq War II, in the center of it, as special representative to both Iran and Venezuela.
These people, Pompeo, Abrams, et al., are incapable of reciting any useful strategy that is in the best interest of America, much less the continuation of Western Civilization past dinner time. Rather, their aim seems as always to be the exhibition of power…without any aim.
H, will you talk about the war game China is increasingly playing up against Taiwan? Seems like a ticking time bomb, and just a matter of time
I suspect this happens right around the election as Trump is more concerned with securing a win and doesn’t have the energy to respond. Just like Hong Kong, overnight we’ll just wake up to a CCP Taiwan, of course with very politely worded press statements about how this isn’t any sort of violation or act of war because reasons.