President Trump is imposing sanctions on Iran's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, amid deepening tensions with Tehran over the 2015 nuclear deal and Iranian attacks on international shipping in the Persian Gulf.
“Javad Zarif implements the reckless agenda of Iran’s Supreme Leader, and is the regime’s primary spokesperson around the world,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a Wednesday announcement. “The United States is sending a clear message to the Iranian regime that its recent behavior is completely unacceptable.”
Trump's decision freezes any U.S. assets owned by Zarif, who was educated in the United States, and prohibits U.S. persons and businesses from dealing with him. It also impedes Zarif’s international travel, although the administration intends to fulfill the obligation to permit official travel to the United Nations in New York. Sanctioning a foreign minister is an unusual step, but U.S. officials were derisive in giving their perspective on the public face of the Iranian government.
“He has had this veneer, a masquerade, if you will, of being a sincere interlocutor for the regime,” a senior administration official said. “We have granted him every courtesy. We have allowed him to exercise the right to free speech that that regime routinely denies to his own citizens. ... He functions as a propaganda minister, not a foreign minister.”
The targeting of Zarif builds on the April decision to blacklist the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization. The Treasury Department noted that the Iranian foreign ministry during Zarif’s tenure has "engaged in and funded efforts to influence elections” in coordination with the IRGC Quds Force, in addition to bribing “foreign judiciary officials” in an attempt to buy the release of IRGC-QF operators.
Mnuchin raised the prospect of sanctioning Zarif in June, when Treasury sanctioned Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, but the maneuver was postponed as European allies argued that the U.S. government should not antagonize Iran gratuitously. But the decision to go through with the blacklisting was foreshadowed in recent weeks by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who repeatedly downplayed Zarif’s significance in Tehran and lamented the ease with which the Iranian official could speak to U.S. media outlets during a recent trip to New York.
“Foreign Minister Zarif is no more in charge of what’s going on in Iran than the man in the moon,” Pompeo said last week. “Zarif gets to come here, he comes to New York, he drives around in the most wonderful city in America, and he speaks to the media, he talks to the American public, gets to put Iranian propaganda out into the American airwaves.”
The sanctions announcement Wednesday coincides with reports that the administration will, on the other hand, extend waivers that allow a limited amount of international cooperation on civilian aspects of Iran’s nuclear program. The administration has been debating a range of options for prosecuting the “maximum pressure” campaign to force Iran to agree to intensified restrictions on the regime’s nuclear weapons program and an end to other destabilizing policies in the Middle East, such as its sponsorship of terrorism.
“This is the ayatollah,” Pompeo said last week. “This is [IRGC Quds Force commander] Qasem Soleimani. Those are the individuals that have to decide that the cost is too high ... and so they will sit down and negotiate — negotiate to terms that just make Iran look like a normal nation.”
When asked if sanctioning Iran's top diplomat would make it difficult to negotiate with the country, the senior administration official said, “If we do have an official contact with Iran, we would want to have contact with someone who is a significant decision-maker.”
