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The United States yesterday announced the approval of sanctions against 18 large Iranian banks, thus dealing a severe blow to the financial sector in Iran, which faces great challenges in light of the US policy of “maximum pressure”, while Tehran accused Washington of flying the remaining channels of payment for food and medicine and work on Starving the Iranian people. But the US State Department later said it would maintain access to humanitarian requirements.
“Our sanctions will continue until Iran stops supporting terrorist activities and ends its nuclear programs,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.
This move, which was pushed by anti-Iranian hawks in President Donald Trump’s administration less than a month before the US presidential election, is expected to isolate the Iranian financial sector from the rest of the world.
Many observers, as well as European diplomats, fear that this will reduce Iran’s ability to obtain goods deemed “humanitarian” (medicine and food) even if the US Department of the Treasury confirms that these materials are subject to exemptions.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif accused the United States of targeting the remaining “channels to pay for food and medicine” in Iran in light of a pandemic, through the new sanctions.
Yesterday, Zarif tweeted: “In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, the American system wants to blow up the remaining channels to pay for food and medicine, but conspiring to starve a people is a crime against humanity.”
In 2018, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the international nuclear deal with Iran, as Trump deemed it insufficient to prevent Tehran from obtaining a nuclear bomb and to end its “destabilizing” behavior in the Middle East.
He reimposed all the US sanctions that were lifted in 2015 while tightening them.
These punitive measures tighten the screws in the Iranian economy because they are accompanied by so-called “secondary” sanctions: any country or company that continues to trade with Iran runs the risk of being prevented from accessing the US financial sector and market.
The Trump administration had announced its goal of weakening the Islamic Republic until it “changed its position” in the region and negotiated a “better deal.”
But as the Republican billionaire’s first term approaches the end of the billionaire’s first term, the Trump administration has made no headway on either front.
(AFP)
