Tuesday, March 19, 2024
HomeARTICLESSenior US officials turn down European requests for Iran waivers

Senior US officials turn down European requests for Iran waivers

Analysis by PMOI/MEK

 

July 14, 2018 – Two of the Trump administration’s main men, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, known for their very strong positions on the Iranian regime, have flatly turned down a request from leaders in Europe seeking waivers from Iran sanctions the U.S. will slap against those countries choosing to do business with the mullahs’ regime after U.S. President Donald Trump has exited from the highly flawed Iran nuclear deal.

The U.S. withdrawal from the deal will most likely make pledges made by the other parties, China, France, Germany, Russia and the U.K., to remain loyal to the pact virtually impossible.

Pompeo and Mnuchin have informed their counterparts in the U.K, France and Germany that Washington will be applying “unprecedented financial pressure” on Tehran’s mullahs after exiting the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA, and will continue until a “tangible, demonstrable and sustained shift” in the Iranian regime’s policies are witnessed, according to a letter seen by the media.

“The president withdrew from the JCPOA for a simple reason — it failed to guarantee the safety of the American people,’’ Pompeo and Mnuchin wrote in the undated letter. “We are thus not in a position to make exceptions to this policy except in very specific circumstances where it clearly benefits our national security.’’

This letter is a response to a communiqué received from Paris, Berlin, and London in June with a request from their governments for Washington to “strongly regret” a decision to exit. The three Green Continent countries also sought a slate of exemptions, including guarantees that EU entities and individuals will be waived from “extraterritorial effects” of scheduled U.S. secondary sanctions.

With talk of U.S. sanctions against the Iranian regime continuing extensively, the mullahs’ oil exports are expected to drop significantly. This is a reminder of the 2013-2015 period where the regime exported 1.0 to 1.5 million BPD while suffering from heavy U.S. and European economic embargoes.

European countries never actually expected to receive sanctions waivers from the U.S., according to a European diplomat talking to Bloomberg. This lack of expectation was also shared by European companies, many of which are already seen pulling out or significantly scaling down their ties with the Iranian regime.

The weight on Tehran is part of a general drive led by Washington seeking to isolate the mullahs and attract the attention necessary to the Iranian regime’s long slate of belligerence across the Middle East and even Europe itself.

More recently, U.S. administration officials are alerting their European counterparts about the arrest of Vienna-based Iranian regime diplomat who stands accused of attempting to provide aid to an Iranian-Belgian couple intending to bomb the annual Iranian opposition – Free Iran 2018 – convention held just outside of Paris recently.

Pompeo continued his efforts on Thursday by posting a number of tweets to raise attention to the level of Tehran’s threats and attacks

 

 

RELATED ARTICLES

Selected

fd88217f-1f1b-4525-92f8-1ec00c750fc9_330
PMOI-MEk1-1

Latest News and Articles

No feed found with the ID 1. Go to the All Feeds page and select an ID from an existing feed.