Chinese and Russian defense companies that strike weapons deals with Iran will suffer the “very full force” of U.S. sanctions, according to the State Department, despite Western disagreements about the legality of President Trump’s move to renew an international arms embargo.
“It’s the position of the United States that the arms embargo should be extended, and had it been extended, we would not have had to snap back to restore the full panoply of U.N. sanctions,” State Department special representative Elliot Abrams, the lead official for Iran, told reporters Wednesday. “So, one practical effect, we believe, will be to say to arms manufacturers and traders around the world that if you engage in business with Iran, very full force of these new, or rather restored, sanctions will be felt immediately, they will be placed on you.”
That threat raises the specter of a U.S. crackdown on China and Russia, which American officials describe as eager to sell high-end weapons systems to the rogue regime. The degree to which European allies would coordinate in that effort remains in doubt, because most Western countries reject the legitimacy of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s decision to invoke the “snapback” mechanism of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that triggers the renewal of the arms embargo and the rest of the sanctions waived by the pact.
“We’ll do all the things we need to do to ensure that those sanctions are enforced,” Pompeo said Wednesday while recalling that the renewal of U.S. economic sanctions on Iran after the 2018 exit from the deal proved efficacious despite European political objections. “I think anyone who has stared at the state of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s financial situation today [can see] we’ve been very successful in spite of what the world said would happen if we made the decision the president made rightly back in May of 2018.”
European powers broke with the U.S. last month at a pair of high-profile junctures at the United Nations Security Council, first by abstaining from a vote over a U.S. resolution to extend the expiring arms embargo (a doomed effort, in their eyes, given Russia and China’s ability to veto the resolution) and then by arguing that the U.S. surrendered the prerogative to trigger the Iran deal snapback when Trump withdrew from the pact in 2018.
Still, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab downplayed the disagreement Wednesday after his private meeting with Pompeo.
“We share the U.S. concerns about Iran and the Iranian threat both on the nuclear side of things but also the wider destabilizing activities in the region,” he told reporters at the State Department. “Our ambition for a broader rapprochement, a more comprehensive deal is, I think, in exactly the same place as the U.S. And frankly, all of the other issues, the means by which we get there, there may be shades of difference, but we always manage them as constructively as we have to this point.”
European leaders have emphasized their opposition to the expiration of the arms embargo despite their refusal to back U.S. maneuvers at the U.N., and the European Union currently maintains its own arms embargo on Iran. Abrams touted that “separate EU arms embargo” as a potential basis for cooperation, even while emphasizing that the U.S. wants compliance at the U.N. level as well.
“They could maintain an EU arms embargo on Iran, and they could do that indefinitely,” he said. “They should take action to ensure, first, that no EU country engages in an arms sale to Iran. And secondly, they should be helping us to enforce the U.N. sanctions. And I do think that if the EU joined us in maintaining those sanctions, obviously, it would have an impact on companies that were contemplating the sale.”
