Trump’s Iran Policy Is Not Changing the Regime’s Actions
Increased economic pressure has created domestic shortages, but Tehran still provides key support to Syria’s Assad and to groups the U.S. calls terrorists.
Soldiers march in a military parade as they mark Iran’s annual army day in Tehran on April 18.
Photographer: Iranian Presidency Office/AP
The U.S. struck yet another blow against Iran on April 22 when the White House announced it would end all sanctions exemptions for countries that import Iranian crude oil. “We’re going to zero,” Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said during a press conference on the policy change. Any nation that continues to buy oil from Iran, he said, will face its own sanctions. “We’ve made our demands very clear to the ayatollah and his cronies,” he said. “End your pursuit of nuclear weapons, stop testing and proliferating ballistic missiles, stop sponsoring and committing terrorism.”
The statements, coming almost a year after President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the multinational nuclear accord with Iran reached in 2015, followed closely on the heels of an April 8 decision to label Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization—the first time the U.S. had given that designation to a government entity. Trump said the decision would “significantly expand the scope and scale” of the administration’s campaign to weaken what it sees as one of the greatest threats to U.S. national security in the Middle East.