As the United States searches for a way back to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, it tiptoes through a minefield established by former US President Donald Trump.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter
The mines are Iran-related sanctions that Trump imposed on more than 700 entities and individuals, according to a Reuters tally of actions by the US Treasury, after he abandoned the nuclear deal and reinstated all sanctions it had removed.
Among these, Trump blacklisted some two dozen institutions vital to Iran's economy, including its central bank and the national oil company, using US laws designed to punish foreign actors for supporting terrorism or the proliferation of weapons. .
Removing many of those sanctions is inevitable if Iran is to export its oil, the biggest benefit it would receive from complying with the nuclear deal and controlling its atomic program.
But eliminating them leaves Democratic President Joe Biden open to accusations that he is soft on terrorism, a political coup that may be inevitable if the deal is to be revived.
The possibility has already drawn strong Republican criticism.
"It's immoral," former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last month as he promoted legislation to make it harder for Biden to lift sanctions against Iran.
John Smith, director of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) from 2015 to 2018, described Trump's wave of sanctions on Iran as "unprecedented in modern American history."
Targeting Iranian institutions for supporting terrorism or for ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has made reviving the deal much more difficult, said Smith, now a partner at the Morrison & Foerster law firm.
"By adding global terrorism, IRGC or human rights abuses to any list, it is incredibly difficult politically … to remove those names from the list," he said. "You can do it, but you will face a much greater setback if you do it."
A US official said the count of sanctions imposed by Trump by Reuters was close to the Biden administration's count, though judgments about what to include may yield slightly different totals.
The reinstatement of US sanctions has ruined the Iranian economy, which contracted 6% in 2018 and 6.8% in 2019, according to data from the International Monetary Fund.
Trump, a Republican, withdrew from the accord in 2018, arguing that it gave Iran excessive sanctions relief for improper nuclear restrictions, and imposed a campaign of "maximum pressure" in a failed attempt to force Tehran to accept nuclear limits. more strict.
He also said the deal had failed to reduce Iran's support for terrorism, backing from regional representatives in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, and the search for ballistic missiles.
Biden wants to restore the nuclear limits of the pact and, if possible, extend them while rejecting what he has called Iran's other destabilizing activities.
US and Iranian officials have started indirect talks in Vienna seeking a way to resume compliance with the deal, which Iran, after waiting about a year after Trump's withdrawal, in 2019 began to violate in retaliation.
Under the agreement, Tehran limited its nuclear program to make it less capable of developing an atomic bomb, an ambition Iran denies, in exchange for relief from economic sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union and the United Nations.
European diplomats move between the US and Iranian delegations because Tehran rejects direct talks. Officials are trying to reach an agreement before May 21, but significant obstacles remain.
Among them is what to do with sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran (CBI), which was sanctioned in 2012 to block its assets under the jurisdiction of the United States. Those sanctions were removed under the nuclear deal and resumed when Trump withdrew.
In September 2019, Trump went further by blacklisting the CBI, accusing it of providing financial support to terrorist groups, effectively preventing foreigners from dealing with it.
He also targeted other parts of Iran's oil infrastructure for alleged support for terrorism, including the National Petroleum Company of Iran (NIOC), the National Iranian Tanker Company, and the National Petrochemical Company.
If Iran is going to sell its oil abroad, sanctions lawyers say these companies must get relief from sanctions, otherwise, they will remain radioactive to foreign companies. American companies are already prohibited from dealing with them under different sanctions.
Heralding a likely Republican line of attack, Elliott Abrams, the Trump administration's last special envoy for Iran, argued that the sanctions were imposed for legitimate reasons.
"Those were legally and morally sufficient and justifiable designations," he said. "They weren't taken out of nowhere."
A senior US State Department official said the Biden administration does not plan to challenge the "evidentiary basis" on which the Trump administration imposed sanctions.
In effect, that means that you will not argue that these entities did not support terrorism.
Rather, he said, the Biden administration has concluded that it is in America's national security interest to return to the nuclear deal, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which justifies the removal of the sanctions.
Trump's decision in April 2019 to blacklist the IRGC and its paramilitary and foreign espionage arm of the Quds Force as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) has also complicated matters.
The action marked the first time the United States formally classified another nation's armed forces as a terrorist group.
In September 2019, OFAC used counterterrorism authorities to attack Iran's central bank, which it accused of having provided billions of dollars to the IRGC, Quds Force and Lebanon's Hezbollah, which Washington has long considered a terrorist group.
"What I would find particularly objectionable is any move to change the IRGC's sanction for terrorist activities because the IRGC participates in terrorist activities. It is a clear case," Abrams said.
However, the Biden administration does not need to remove the IRGC's FTO designation to remove the related sanctions at the central bank.
The Treasury secretary can reverse any sanctions imposed on the central bank under US executive orders, which give the president the ability to impose or rescind them at will, former US officials said.
Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!
The State Department has only said that if Tehran were to resume compliance with the agreement, it would remove those sanctions "inconsistent with the JCPOA" without giving details.
"The political heat is going to be quite intense, frankly," said Iran analyst Henry Rome of the Eurasia Group. "Anything involving the 'T' word, in this case, will be a ready-made talking point for those who oppose a return" to the nuclear deal, he said, referring to 'terrorism.'
"The political challenge here is to say, 'The appointments may have been legitimate, but we have other foreign policy interests that dictate nonetheless eliminating them.' It is a difficult needle to thread, but it is one that they will have to do. "
