Washington foreign policies these days are dominated by a bizarre kind of political sado-masochism, not unlike the argument given by the CIA that torture such as waterboarding is a successful, legitimate way to extract invaluable intelligence from an enemy combatant. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo come to mind. The war-makers like CIA head honcho John Brennan or Victoria Nuland at the State Department, or neocon Ash (as in ashes of war) Carter at the Pentagon seem to be convinced that to be a great nation, first you must be "hard cop," beat the daylights out of your target person or nation. You sanction them to the point of breaking economically. Then you flip sides and go "soft cop." Their silly CIA and military torture handbooks tell them this works every time. Only problem, it doesn't. This is definitely true with several nations today who resist the bully hard cop-soft cop games of Washington. What Iran is doing in terms of pricing its oil export sales is an example.
In summer of 2015 the United States agreed to a lifting of sanctions on Iran, on certain conditions, allegedly tied to Iranian guarantees to IAEA international monitoring of its nuclear reactor program.
The most brutal of sanctions were devised by the US Treasury's aggressive Office of Financial Terrorism in January 2012. They were then imposed by the European Union under immense Washington pressure. Among other measures they imposed unprecedented worldwide cessation of all Iranian banks' access to the SWIFT interbank payments system for sales of its oil or trade on world markets.
SWIFT, Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, clears most world interbank financial transactions. It is based in Belgium and owned by private banks, not by the EU. It was SWIFT's first expulsion of any institution in its 39 year history. The SWIFT expulsion was designed by David Cohen, US Undersecretary of Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, together with Mark Dubowitz, a sanctions specialist in Washington. It was the financial equivalent of Washington deciding to use a
thermonuclear weapon.
As well, the EU agreed to an oil embargo on Iran and to freezing the assets of Iran's central bank abroad. The Iranian currency rapidly collapsed some 80% to the dollar. Iranian inflation, especially for vital wheat imports, exploded and oil exports to major customers including the EU, China, Japan, South Korea and India were
cut in half.
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