US envoy for Iran says Trump plans steady sanctions increase in coming weeks

The Trump administration will continue to steadily increase sanctions on Iran in the coming weeks as has long been planned, but will not dramatically escalate punitive measures against the regime, US Special Representative for Iran Elliott Abrams says.

“We have a maximum pressure sanctions program. This will continue in November and December, because it’s unrelated to politics, it has nothing to do with the elections. It’s the foreign policy of the US, and it’s based on Iran’s conduct,” he tells Israeli reporters during a briefing in Tel Aviv.

Abrams, a veteran of hawkish US administrations, says that while it is too early to declare who won the presidential elections, he is optimistic that Joe Biden would leverage Iran’s dire economic situation, which resulted from the outgoing administration’s sanctions regime into forcing the Islamic Republic into concessions.

He also says that it would be difficult for Biden to quickly reenter the 2015 nuclear deal.

“It doesn’t really matter who is president on January 20 in the sense that there’s going to be a negotiation with Iran anyway. That was the intention of the Trump administration; that’s not a source of disagreement,” he says. “Whether it’s possible to rejoin the JCPOA remains to be seen.”

Abrams, who met with Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Benny Gantz before heading tomorrow to the UAE and Saudi Arabia, says that he thinks it would be “extremely difficult” for the Trump administration to broker a deal in the 70 days before Inauguration Day.

— Raphael Ahren