US launches economic war on Iran, roils Mideast and world geopolitics
By
Keith Jones
7 August 2018
US President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday re-imposing, effective today, sweeping US economic sanctions against Iran that had been suspended in January 2016 as part of the Iran nuclear deal.
The sanctions, which Washington is demanding all other countries join it in enforcing, are both illegal and tantamount to an act of war.
Moreover, they are accompanied by increasing US military pressure and threats of war against Tehran. Trump tweeted late last month that Iran would “SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED” if it ever “THREATEN[ED]” the US. In recent days there have been repeated threats, couched as warnings, from the Pentagon that Washington will take whatever military action is necessary to secure “freedom of navigation” through the Straits of Hormuz, the conduit for much of Iranian and Mideast oil.
Unlike the European Union, the US, under Obama, refused to rescind the brutal economic sanctions they had jointly mounted against Iran from 2011 through 2015, and instead agreed only to suspend them. It claimed the threat of the immediate “snap-back” of sanctions was needed to ensure Iranian compliance with the nuclear deal.
However, it is Washington that has brazenly broken the agreement. Trump has “snapped back” sanctions on Iran, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the five other great powers that negotiated the nuclear accord, and even the US State Department are in agreement Tehran has fulfilled its obligations under the accord to the letter.
In May, when he announced the US was torpedoing the Iran accord, Trump still made an attempt, albeit a fatuous one, to argue that…