U.S. officials imposed sanctions on two Iranian military technology networks, undermining the regime’s ballistic missile supply chain days after Tehran rebuffed talks with President Trump.
“The United States will continue to increase pressure on the Iranian regime until it changes its behavior,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday evening.
That’s a reassuring message for Iran hawks who worried that Trump’s open-minded comment about offering Iran a “letter of credit” might foreshadow a softening of the maximum pressure campaign. European allies would welcome such a shift, but the Trump administration used the announcement as an opportunity to call for allies to tighten their own sanctions enforcement.
“We urge governments worldwide to recognize the extraordinary lengths to which the regime in Tehran will go to conceal its behavior, and to ensure that their companies and financial institutions are not facilitating Iran’s proliferation activities,” said Sigal Mandelker, the Treasury Department’s under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.
Mandelker’s team blacklisted two networks that work on behalf of “multiple Iranian military organizations,” including the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp, Iran’s Ministry of Defense Armed Forces Logistics, and Iran’s Naval Defense Missile Industry Group. One of the newly-sanctioned Iranian suppliers used a front company in Hong Kong “to purchase export-controlled military end-use equipment from U.S. suppliers.” The other obtained “large amounts of aluminum alloy products” for Iranian companies involved in the regime’s nuclear weapons program.
“Washington should use these activities as evidence to get its trans-Atlantic partners to issue missile sanctions at the EU level,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said in response to the sanctions announcement. “Keeping up this pressure forces Tehran to operate at greater cost abroad and with one arm tied behind its back as it tries to grow missile capabilities.”
Leading European allies have avoided joining the maximum pressure campaign that Trump launched after exiting the 2015 Iran nuclear deal last year, because they believe that the pact defused a nuclear crisis and they hope to convince Tehran to remain subject to the deal for as long as possible.
“We need to be sure that Iran will never get a nuclear weapon and that there will be no flare-ups in the region,” French President Emmanuel Macron said Sunday during a joint press conference with Trump at the G-7 Summit in France. “And on the other hand, we need to convince the Iranians to go in that direction. And we can do that if we give them economic compensation of some form, if we make some movement in terms of lines of credit or reopening certain economic sectors.”
Trump seemed open to that idea Sunday, as Macron tried to set the stage for a meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, but Pompeo maintained that the administration is still trying “to starve their capacity” to fund regional aggression.
“It takes wealth,” Pompeo said during a Monday radio interview. “We’re trying to deny them the wealth and resources so they can foment terror around the world.”
