What will Trump’s ‘substantially increased’ sanctions on Iran achieve?

Hostility between Iran and the US-Saudi Arabian alliance continued to flare dangerously yesterday, with bellicose rhetoric from both sides.

Donald Trump said he had ordered Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to “substantially increase” already-devastating sanctions on Iran.

The US president’s decision - which he announced over Twitter - comes days after drones and cruise missiles struck Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq refinery and Khurais oil field. The attacks cut Saudi’s oil production in half, reducing global output by almost 6% and sent oil prices soaring.

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Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen publicly claimed responsibility for the strike, but Washington and Riyadh insist the Iranian regime is in fact directly to blame.

“This attack was launched from the north, and was unquestionably sponsored by Iran,” said Colonel Turki al-Maliki, a spokesman for the Saudi Defense Ministry, at a news conference in Riyadh yesterday. “This attack did not originate from Yemen, despite Iran’s best effort to make it appear so.”

Speaking from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on Wednesday, after the Saudis revealed their evidence, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the attacks “an act of war”.

On Monday, President Trump tweeted to signify who he considered responsible. “Remember when Iran shot down a drone, saying knowingly that it was in their ‘airspace’ when, in fact, it was nowhere close. They stuck strongly to that story knowing that it was a very big lie. Now they say that they had nothing to do with the attack on Saudi Arabia. We’ll see?”

Tehran, however, issued statements of denial. “While exerting psychological and economic pressure on the Iranian people, they want to impose maximum... pressure on Iran through slander,” said Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, according to the Iranian state media service IRIB. “Meanwhile, no one believes these accusations.”

Referring to the ongoing Saudi-Iranian proxy war in Yemen, the Iranian president continued, saying: “We don’t want conflict in the region... Who started the conflict? Not the Yemenis. It was Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, America, certain European countries and the Zionist regime [Israel] which started the war in this region.”

Downing Street released a statement on Wednesday, detailing a telephone call between the US president and Prime Minister Boris Johnson. “The Prime Minister spoke to President Trump this afternoon following Saturday’s attacks on the Aramco oil facilities in Saudi Arabia," said the statement. “They condemned the attacks and discussed the need for a united diplomatic response from international partners.”

Set against a wider backdrop, Saturday’s attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure come after oil tankers were targeted throughout May and June in the Strait of Hormuz. That strike, plus the tanker attacks, were calibrated by Tehran to “demonstrate that it can threaten global oil markets, forcing others to share its economic pain,” according to The New York Times.

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There are a number of factors fueling skepticism about Trump’s response to the crisis.

“European officials blame him, as much as the Iranians, for creating the circumstances that led to the attack,” writes David Sanger in The New York Times. “In their telling, it was Mr. Trump’s decision... to abandon the 2015 nuclear deal that set in motion the events that culminated in the crippling of the two Saudi oil fields.”

Indeed, President Emmanuel Macron of France recently proposed a $15bn line of credit designed to circumvent US sanctions in the hope of keeping the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) - the Iran nuclear deal - alive.

Full stretch

Others point out that sanctions are already at full stretch, so it is hard to see what a “substantial” increase might look like.

“The Trump administration will be scraping the bottom of the barrel,” said Henry Rome, an analyst at the Washington-based Eurasia Group. “They’ve gone down the list of top industries and crossed them out. They can target minor industries and individuals... and they can certainly make announcements every day for the next year and a half, but at this point there is very little utility to that.”

No appetite

Many analysts simply doubt Trump’s willingness for war. The US President is a political animal, and knows his electorate has no appetite for or interest in foreign adventures.

“Trump is reluctant to take military action in the Middle East because he wants to live up to his campaign vows to reduce foreign entanglements, according to multiple people who speak with him regularly,” reports Politico. “He’s also worried about the economic and political ramifications of embroiling the United States in a war with Iran.”

The problem for Trump is that Iran knows this. “Just as Washington has leveraged Tehran’s economic vulnerability on oil exports, Tehran is leveraging US vulnerabilities – specifically, the lack of appetite among its electorate for a new war in the Middle East,” writes Mahsa Rouhi in The Guardian.

There is an obvious tension at the heart of the US administration. Anti-interventionist “America first” promises formed one of the linchpins of Trump’s presidential campaign, but these promises are seemingly at odds with the agendas of the foreign policy hawks he hired as advisers after entering office.

Blow to new deal

Trump’s team has pursued a relentless policy of “maximum pressure” on the regime in Tehran, reneging on America’s commitment to the JCPOA, allowing them to ratchet up sanctions to a level that has ravaged the Iranian economy.

However, after Trump fired national security adviser John Bolton, one of the flagbearers of the “maximum pressure” doctrine, earlier this month, there have been reports that Washington was ready to enter talks with Tehran. “A week ago, before the Saudi Arabian strike, media reports suggested Mr Trump had discussed reducing sanctions against the Islamic republic in an effort to facilitate a meeting with Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, at the UN General Assembly this month,” reports The Financial Times. “The likelihood of such a summit has faded in the wake of the attack.”

It seems that now, following Saturday’s attacks, any hopes the Trump administration had of negotiating a new nuclear deal on better terms have been dealt a major blow, particularly given the news, yesterday, that Iranian officials may cancel next week’s trip to the UN General Assembly after visas were not issued to their advanced team.

“Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif may cancel their visit to the UN General Assembly if the U.S. doesn’t issue visas ‘in the next few hours,’” Bloomberg reports.

Maximum resistance

It is clear that despite overwhelming economic pressure, Tehran believes they cannot be seen to give ground. “Iranian hard-liners consider Trump’s inconsistency to be weakness,” said Ali Ansari, a professor of Iranian history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “Their policy of ‘maximum resistance’ is working.”

Trump’s dual campaign promises - to end foreign entanglements and to bring down the JCPOA - look, at this stage, to be mutually deleterious. Tehran, unbridled by its JCPOA commitments, and distrustful of its enemies, has embarked on a campaign of violence that has only entangled the US further in regional conflict.

“The years-long struggle for regional influence between Iran and Saudi Arabia and their partners plays out in proxy wars that rip the region apart, such as the current humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen,” writes Michael H. Fuchs in The Guardian. “The US has taken Saudi Arabia’s side in this regional conflict, in which there is no ‘good side’, and in the process only exacerbated the tensions and violence.”