Iran slams US sanctions
IRAN warned yesterday that new US sanctions targeting its supreme leader and other top officials meant “closing the doors of diplomacy” between Tehran and Washington amid heightened tensions, even as the country’s president derided the White House as being “afflicted by mental retardation”.
President Hassan Rouhani went on to call the sanctions against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “outrageous and idiotic”, especially since the 80-year-old Shia cleric has no plans to travel to the US.
Yet the sharp response from Tehran shows the pressure that the nation’s Shia theocracy and its 80 million people feel over the maximalist campaign of sanctions by the Trump administration.
From Israel, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton said Iran could walk through an “open door” to talks with America, though he also warned that “all options remain on the table” if Tehran makes good on its promise to begin breaking one limit from its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
While resembling the exchange of insults just before North Korean leader and Trump sat down for talks, Iran so far appears to have no interest in negotiations. “The useless sanctioning of Islamic Revolution Supreme Leader (Khamenei) and the commander of Iranian diplomacy means closing the doors of diplomacy by the US’s desperate administration,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi tweeted.
“Trump’s government is annihilating all the established international mechanisms for keeping peace and security in the world.”
The crisis gripping the Middle East stems from Trump’s withdrawal a year ago from the nuclear deal with Iran and other world powers and then imposing crippling new sanctions on Tehran.
Recently, Iran quadrupled its production of low-enriched uranium to be on pace to break one of the deal’s terms by tomorrow, while also threatening to raise enrichment closer to weapons-grade levels on July 7 if European countries still abiding by the accord don’t offer a new deal.
Citing unspecified Iranian threats, the US has sent an aircraft carrier to the Middle East and deployed additional troops alongside the tens of thousands already there. All this has raised fears that a miscalculation or further rise in tensions could push the US and Iran into an open conflict 40 years after the Islamic Revolution.
Trump enacted the new sanctions against Khamenei and his associates on Monday.
That action followed Iran’s downing on Thursday of a US surveillance drone, worth over $100 million (R1.4bn), above the Strait of Hormuz, sharply escalating the crisis. Trump then said he pulled back from the brink of retaliatory military strikes but continued his pressure campaign against Iran. BORIS Johnson, the favourite to become British prime minister, said he would seek a new Brexit deal with the EU, but if the bloc refused his demands then he would lead out the world’s fifth-largest economy without agreement on October 31.
The UK’s three-year Brexit crisis could be about to deepen as Johnson’s pledge to leave the EU with or without a deal on Halloween could provoke a stand-off with the British parliament, which has indicated its opposition to a no-deal exit. No-deal means there would be no transition period so the exit would be abrupt – the nightmare scenario for many business leaders, and the dream of hard Brexiteers who want a decisive split.
“My pledge is to come out of the EU at Halloween on 31 October,” said Johnson, 55, adding that there were “abundant technical fixes” to prevent the return of a hard border between Ireland and the UK’s Northern Ireland.
He repeated a warning that there would be “creative ambiguity” about when and how a previously agreed £39 billion (R709bn) exit bill gets paid.
The EU has refused to renegotiate the Withdrawal Agreement reached with May last November, and Ireland has indicated it’s not willing to change the Irish border “backstop” that upset the Northern Irish party which props up May’s minority government.
Johnson said he didn’t want a no-deal Brexit – which investors warn would roil financial markets and send shock waves through the European economy – but that it was necessary to put it on the table so Britain could get the result it wanted.
“The way to get our friends and partners to understand how serious we are is finally, I’m afraid, to abandon the defeatism and negativity that’s enfolded us in a great cloud for so long, and to prepare confidently and seriously for a WTO (World Trade Organisation) or no-deal outcome,” he told BBC TV.
Britain is a member of the organisation so tariffs and other terms governing its trade with the EU would be set under WTO rules.
Business leaders have already triggered contingency plans to cope with additional checks on the post-Brexit UK-EU border they fear will clog ports, silt up the arteries of trade and dislocate supply chains in Europe and beyond. Brexit supporters say there would be short-term disruption but in the long-term the UK would thrive if cut free.