President-elect Donald Trump plans to renew his “maximum pressure” policy on Iran when he returns to the White House on Jan. 20, including issuing punishing sanctions and targeting Tehran’s oil income.
Sources briefed on Trump’s early plans told The Wall Street Journal on Friday that the harsh measures against the regime are part of an aggressive strategy to weaken the Islamic Republic’s support for its regional terrorist proxies and significantly harm its nuclear ambitions.
Former Trump officials said that his approach to Iran will likely be influenced by its attempt to assassinate him. The U.S. Department of Justice charged three men on Friday who it said were involved in the Iranian plot.
“People tend to take that stuff personally,” Mick Mulroy, a top Pentagon official for the Mideast in Trump’s first term, told the Journal. “If he’s going to be hawkish on any particular country, designated major adversaries, it’s Iran.”
Trump’s team will move swiftly to try to strangle Iran’s oil industry, including targeting foreign ports and people who buy and sell Iranian oil.
“I think you are going to see the sanctions go back on, you are going to see much more, both diplomatically and financially, they are trying to isolate Iran. I think the perception is that Iran is definitely in a position of weakness right now, and now is an opportunity to exploit that weakness,” said a former White House official.
The Iranian rial reportedly fell to a historic low following Trump’s election.
During his first term in the White House, Trump imposed sanctions on Iran for its pursuit of nuclear weapons and took the United States out of an agreement in 2018 with the Islamic Republic forged three years earlier by his predecessor, Barack Obama.
At an election rally on Tuesday, Trump said that he wants Iran “to be a very successful country,” but that it “can’t have nuclear weapons.”
