Peace Time: Those Smuggler-Friendly Americans
17th January 2022
Iran is still suffering from reimposed (in 2018) economic sanctions but, as expected, the new (in January 2021) U.S. government has provided some relief. The Americans have been helpful in several ways, not all of them very visible. For example, the Americans quietly reduced their sanctions enforcement on illegal Iranian oil exports during 2021. This enabled Iranian oil smugglers to ship and sell 40 percent more oil than in 2020. That’s 123 million more barrels of oil sold at a discount, from the world price for legal oil, to countries like China, Syria, Russia and Venezuela. In 2021 the U.S. halted enforcement of the oil export sanctions in the Persian Gulf, which made it possible for smugglers to sell discounted Iranian oil to Arab Persian Gulf countries, mainly the UAE, where that oil could then be exported as Arab oil to distant customers. Iran has a fleet of tankers, most not owned by Iran, that handle the smuggling and American efforts to track and sanction these tankers declined as did the number of times smuggling tankers were detected but not intercepted. Because of this Iran had several hundred million dollars of oil income that was apparently used mainly to sustain Iran-sponsored violence overseas.