Executive order is reportedly aimed at ‘driving Iran’s oil exports to zero’
President Donald Trump is set to restore his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign on Iran in a bid to eliminate the country’s illicit oil exports.
An impending executive order, which Trump is expected to sign on Tuesday, will reverse the Biden administration’s perennial lax sanctions enforcement that brought Tehran more than $140 billion in profits.
The order will kickstart an administration-wide effort to reinstall “maximum economic pressure on Iran,” according to Reuters, which described the effort as “aimed at driving Iran’s oil exports to zero.” The Treasury Department will be responsible for enforcing sanctions on Tehran’s fleet of oil tankers, while the State Department will nix a series of sanctions waivers that made it easier for Iran to access cash.
The effort fulfills a Trump campaign promise to target Iran’s financial networks and continues a policy he pursued during his first stint in the White House when he abandoned the 2015 nuclear accord and slapped a bevy of sanctions on Tehran’s regional terror proxies.
Iranian state-controlled media described the White House’s fresh push as “futile,” saying on Tuesday that “sanctions cannot bring the country to its knees, nor will they be able to do [sic] in the future.”
Under the Biden administration, however, Iran raked in more than $140 billion from its illicit oil sales, primarily to China, according to figures compiled by the advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran.
“China has proven the savior of Tehran by continuing to import millions of barrels of oil every single day, and imports have likely even exceeded those made when the trade was not subject to U.S. sanctions,” the organization reported in late December, just before Trump took office.
The Biden administration’s reluctance to enforce sanctions already on the books drove those oil sales.
“Iran’s unprecedented oil sales have occurred because, for nearly four years, the Biden-Harris administration stopped enforcing U.S. sanctions,” Andrea Stricker, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, told the Washington Free Beacon in July. “Tehran and its proxies have used this revenue to attack Israel, U.S. troops, and global shipping.”
The Biden administration also greenlit a sanctions waiver that empowered Iraq to provide Tehran’s regime with access to more than $10 billion in electricity payments. This cash, critics argued, helped free up revenue streams for Iran’s regional terror proxies as they waged war on Israel.
The Free Beacon reported in January that Iraq is also playing a central role in a billion-dollar oil-for-cash scheme run by Iranian militias in the country. An intelligence dossier presented to senior Biden administration officials identified Iraq’s government as central to an Iranian “oil and fuel smuggling” operation that significantly expanded in 2022.
It is likely that the Trump administration will seek to disrupt this type of fuel smuggling in combination with tough new sanctions on Tehran’s energy sector.
