The Trump administration has moved to hit senior officials and the manufacturing and metals sectors in Iran with new sanctions as economic punishment for its missile strikes against US forces in Iraq this week.
The sanctions were announced by Steven Mnuchin, the US Treasury secretary, and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, in a press conference at the White House on Friday.
The move is the most concrete response so far from the Trump administration to the attacks launched on US bases in Iraq by Tehran on Tuesday night, in retaliation for the US drone strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, the top Iranian military commander.
Mr Trump has chosen not to react with new military action that risks sparking full-blown war. Donald Trump, the US president, had approved the new sanctions at the White House on Thursday, but waited a day to roll them out. “They were very severe, but now it’s increased substantially,” he said on Thursday. Mr Trump had reimposed hefty sanctions on Tehran’s oil, financial and shipping sectors in 2018 as part of the US’s withdrawal from the 2015 multi-party nuclear deal that Iran signed with the US, three European powers, China and Russia to limit its nuclear programme. The 2018 sanctions also targeted Iranian carpets, aircraft, gold, steel, cars, industrial software, currency, debt and insurance. The new sanctions announced on Friday would target the construction, manufacturing, textiles and mining industries, Mr Mnuchin said.
The Treasury secretary said the sanctions would not only ban US businesses from transactions with those Iranian targets, but would also be “secondary” in nature, meaning entities from third countries would also be prevented from doing business with those targets. More specifically, Mr Mnuchin said 17 sanctions would be applied to Iran’s largest steel manufacturer.
Since it imposed sanctions on Iran, the US has deprived Tehran of billions of dollars of revenue. But while the administration hoped to squeeze Iran enough to convince it to open talks with the US, that has not happened. “There’s a serious point of diminishing returns,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think-tank in Washington.
