Trump's Iran Crackdown Isn't Working

Despite the economic hit, the Islamic republic is still funding groups the U.S. calls terrorists.

- Jillian Goodman

The U.S. struck yet another blow against Iran on April 22, when the White House said it would end all sanctions exemptions for countries that import Iranian crude oil. “We’re going to zero,” Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said at a press conference on the policy change. Any nation that keeps buying Iranian oil faces its own sanctions. “We’ve made our demands very clear to the ayatollah and his cronies,” he said. “End your pursuit of nuclear weapons, stop testing and proliferating ballistic missiles, stop sponsoring and committing terrorism.”

The statements, coming almost a year after President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the multinational nuclear accord with Iran reached in 2015, followed closely on the heels of an April 8 decision to label Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization—the first time the U.S. had given that designation to a government entity. Trump said the decision would “significantly expand the scope and scale” of the administration’s campaign to weaken what it sees as one of the greatest threats to U.S. national security in the Middle East.

While Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, wanted to persuade Iran to change its policies by strengthening its links with the rest of the world, this administration is betting that economic isolation will force it to abandon ballistic missile development and change other behavior Trump calls unacceptable.