President Trump’s top national security adviser will not participate in the rollout of the pending White House plan to impose sanctions on Iran, according to two sources familiar with the process, after the administration settled on a course of action that is disappointing Iran hawks.
Trump has decided to grant waivers to a series of key countries that would like to continue purchasing oil from Iran, and won’t push for the regime’s banks to be disconnected from a critical international financial entity.
That outcome is a disappointment to at least some advocates of the president’s “maximum pressure” campaign. White House national security adviser John Bolton was expected to issue a statement on camera Friday outlining a more aggressive path, but he scrapped that plan Thursday afternoon.
“The NSC is washing its hands of this fiasco,” a senior Republican congressional aide told the Washington Examiner. “State has to scramble to figure out how to do a rollout.”
A State Department official confirmed that Bolton withdrew, while emphasizing that the administration would still implement the renewed Iran sanctions. “We are expecting the snap-back sanctions to be in place by Nov. 4,” the official said. “The whole thing has been a long-running debate, and everybody is working it out.”
It’s a counter-intuitive turn for an administration that forecasted a “maximum pressure” campaign earlier this year. Trump’s decision to install Bolton as national security adviser and shift then-CIA director Mike Pompeo — one of the staunchest critics of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal — to the State Department set the stage for a U.S. exit from the nuclear deal.
But, on the cusp of the most intense phase of the sanctions campaign, Pompeo split with Bolton and agreed with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who has been more sympathetic to European concerns about the potential collapse of the deal.
“The plan to keep them all connected is Mnuchin’s plan,” a senior Senate Republican aide told the Washington Examiner. “Technically, it’s the European’s plan, which Mnuchin accepted.”
The most hawkish voices, in and out of government, favored a move to disconnect Iranian banks from key entity in the international financial system known as SWIFT. The decision not to do so is a major disappointment for national security officials who hoped that Trump would implement sanctions aggressively enough to pose an existential threat to the regime.
“If they are not expelled from SWIFT and they have a path in their mind to keep exploring for sanctions evasion, to just hang on until they outlast President Trump,” the sanctions expert said. “There’s always the possibility that the maximum pressure works: They start running out of money, they don’t have enough money to keep pouring things into Yemen and Syria, they don’t have enough money to do basic subsidies to appease the population, and at that point they get very concerned about regime survival, politically, and start pushing envoys out to say, ‘We want to talk, we want to have a deal.’”
The administration had warned world leaders not to expect waivers from sanctions designed to thwart the regime from profiting from the sale of oil.
“We are not looking to grant licenses or waivers, because doing so would substantially reduce pressure on Iran,” Brian Hook, now the State Department’s special envoy for Iran, told reporters in July. “We are prepared to work with countries that are reducing their imports on a case-by-case basis. But as with our other sanctions, we are not looking to grant waivers or licenses.”
The Trump administration is now expected to issue waivers to five major consumers of Iranian oil: China, India, Iraq, South Korea, and Japan.
“Administration officials used to tell us it’s OK to give Iran concessions on SWIFT because they would force oil exports down to zero,” a congressional source told the Washington Free Beacon, which first reported the outlines of the plan.
“Now they’re saying it’s OK to give concessions on both SWIFT and energy, because this is just the beginning of a long campaign.”
Both supporters and opponents of the deal agree that oil waivers and a SWIFT reprieve make it much more likely that Iran will remain in technical compliance with the agreement.
“For the moment the Iranians have walked slightly down from the messaging of the Europeans not doing enough,” a European diplomat told the Washington Examiner. “But it’s not just economic benefit. There’s also then kind of, for lack of a better word, the moral high ground that the Iranians can continue to peddle in terms of saying that ‘we are still abiding by our responsibilities under the deal.’”
