标签： Asia

For more than a decade, Donald Trump anchored his approach to Iran in uncompromising economic pressure, building his political brand around criticizing the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal for sending what he called “plane loads of cash” to Tehran. Now, as he seeks to broker a deal to end the ongoing Middle East war, the success of his goal rests entirely on the one issue he has spent years refusing to budge on: how much financial relief he is willing to give the Islamic Republic.

According to Alex Vatanka, a senior Iran expert at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, financial concessions are not just a secondary ask for Iran – they are the foundation of any potential compromise. Multiple current and former U.S. and Arab officials speaking to Middle East Eye confirm that Trump’s reluctance to ease sanctions and unlock frozen Iranian assets is the primary barrier to progress, leaving negotiations deadlocked and at high risk of collapse.

Contrary to widespread public framing, the core dispute is not Iran’s nuclear program or uranium enrichment limits. Tehran has even tabled a proposal to set the nuclear issue aside temporarily in order to reopen the closed Strait of Hormuz and end hostilities. Insiders familiar with the negotiations say the actual intractable sticking point is sanctions relief, a far more politically charged issue for the Trump administration than nuclear caps.

A former U.S. official who has consulted with Gulf and American stakeholders on the talks put it bluntly: “Everyone has ideas about a compromise on enrichment, but the hardest circle to square for Trump is lifting sanctions. My understanding is that this is more sensitive than the nuclear file.”

The roots of this impasse stretch back to Trump’s longstanding Iran policy. After first campaigning against the JCPOA, he unilaterally withdrew from the landmark 2015 agreement in 2018 and reimposed crippling, sweeping sanctions that have gutted Iran’s economy. The JCPOA had granted Tehran broad sanctions relief in exchange for capping uranium enrichment at 3.67% – a level far below what is required for a nuclear weapon – and opening all nuclear facilities to rigorous international inspections. Even after a ceasefire took hold between Iran, the U.S. and Israel this year, Trump has shown no willingness to retreat from his maximum pressure economic campaign.

Vatanka noted that Trump’s own early rhetoric has boxed him in politically. “The way he misrepresented the JCPOA from the get-go has made life harder for him now, because anything he does will be measured by what he criticised Obama for,” he explained.

This political trap played out publicly in recent weeks, when the U.S. rolled out new sanctions targeting a Chinese oil refinery and dozens of shipping firms and vessels involved in transporting Iranian oil just hours before scheduled talks between U.S. and Iranian delegates in Islamabad. The meeting was immediately scrapped.

Diplomats say the reason for this intransigence is clear: if the war ends with Iran in a stronger financial position than it started, the Trump administration would face massive political backlash at home. Barely a month before U.S. and Israeli forces launched strikes against Iranian targets, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent celebrated the impact of sanctions at the World Economic Forum in Davos, boasting that U.S. economic pressure had sent Iran’s currency, the rial, “into free fall” and pushed the Iranian people “out on the streets.”

“This is economic statecraft – no shots fired. And things are moving in a very positive way here,” Bessent said at the time. Turning around that policy now would amount to a major reversal.

For Iran’s side, however, the need for financial relief is existential. While Tehran has earned higher oil revenues by leveraging its control of the Strait of Hormuz during the war, and can still sell stored crude held on tankers in East Asia in the short term, the long-term economic damage is catastrophic. U.S. and Israeli strikes have caused an estimated $300 billion in damage to Iran’s infrastructure, and an Iranian business newspaper reported in April that full reconstruction will take at least 12 years. For Iran’s leadership, which has seen its domestic popularity rise amid the conflict, securing tangible economic gains to deliver to the public is critical to consolidating that support after the war.

Alan Eyre, a former member of the U.S. negotiating team that drafted the original JCPOA, argues that the nuclear issue has become a secondary, outdated concern in the current talks – an analogy he compared to Betamax, the obsolete 1970s video format. “Everyone is talking about what the Iranians are willing to give up. But that is largely a function of what they are willing to get,” Eyre said. “What the Iranians want is money.”

Eyre outlined four key pathways Tehran has outlined to secure that financial compensation: direct war reparations, tolling revenue for access to the Strait of Hormuz, unlocking tens of billions in frozen foreign assets, and broad, permanent sanctions relief. Of these options, he views a Hormuz tolling agreement as the most politically feasible path to a deal.

Estimates suggest Iran holds roughly $100 billion in frozen assets held abroad – a sum equal to nearly a quarter of the country’s total annual GDP. Billions are held in escrow accounts (including $6 billion in Qatar), while oil sale revenues are locked up in South Korea, Japan and European financial institutions. In April, Axios reported the U.S. had offered to unfreeze $20 billion in assets in exchange for Iran abandoning its entire enriched uranium stockpile, but political headwinds have stalled any movement.

Eyre noted that Trump is extremely unlikely to approve the release of major tranches of frozen assets before the November 2026 U.S. midterm elections, given his years of political attacks on the 2015 JCPOA over the “plane loads of cash” claim. Iran, for its part, is deeply wary of temporary sanctions relief after being burned by Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the original nuclear deal. After that exit, Western and Asian businesses fled the country out of fear of secondary U.S. sanctions, leaving Iranian firms with worthless contracts and no economic gains to show for their nuclear concessions.

“The bad thing about sanctions relief for the Iranians is that it’s reversible. That is what they are scared about – giving away the family jewels for something that can be taken away,” Eyre explained.

Discussions of a Strait of Hormuz tolling system have also faced major obstacles. Trump initially floated the idea of the U.S. and Iran sharing toll revenue for commercial access to the strategic waterway, but the administration has since walked back that proposal. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News the U.S. will never accept Iran formalizing control over the international waterway. “They cannot normalise – nor can we tolerate them trying to normalise – a system in which the Iranians decide who gets to use an international waterway and how much you have to pay them to use it,” Rubio said.

A senior Arab diplomat told MEE that Washington’s initial openness to the idea faced fierce pushback from Gulf Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait, which refuse to accept Iran as the legitimate gatekeeper of the waterway that most of their oil exports pass through. The diplomat added that Iran is well aware its neighbors are already moving ahead with projects to bypass the Strait of Hormuz entirely, regardless of the outcome of talks: Iraq, for example, is already expanding crude shipments by truck to Syria’s Mediterranean coast and increasing the capacity of its oil pipeline to Turkey.

“Iran knows that a toll is unpalatable with practically all of its neighbours. There would be constant friction, and efforts are underway to bypass Hormuz in the future,” the diplomat said.

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, argues that Iran is only using the tolling proposal as a bargaining chip to win broader sanctions relief. “I don’t think the money from tolling is anywhere near the amount of money that sanctions relief will provide them,” Parsi explained. “The Iranians are approaching these talks as an attempt to get a final deal with the US, and that means all sanctions have to be lifted.”

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, an Iran economy expert at Virginia Tech, agreed that lasting sanctions relief is non-negotiable for Tehran as it seeks to stabilize the country after the war. “Inside Iran, the image of this government has actually improved in people’s eyes because of the war. But the sacrifices made have to lead to something better for people when this ends,” he said. “Iran doesn’t just need to have the ability to export oil, but buy and sell on the international market. They need to create manufacturing jobs. The war needs to end with Iran becoming a normal economy.”

While the issue of full economic normalization remains politically toxic for Trump, Parsi argues that a deal could still be framed as a political win for his base. Trump himself has previously suggested that reviving Iran’s economy could open massive new opportunities for U.S. businesses. Parsi notes that lifting all sanctions would open the largest new market to U.S. companies since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a point that could resonate with Trump’s pro-business supporters. Even so, Parsi acknowledged that securing a deal will be an uphill battle.

“This will be the biggest fight Trump has had with the Israelis, who oppose any sanctions relief. They will do everything they can to stop it,” he said.

Months after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a sweeping set of Trump-era tariffs that exceeded presidential authority, the Trump administration is in a frantic race to roll out permanent replacement import levies before the temporary replacement measures expire this July. The timeline, accelerated to beat the midterm election cycle, has already sparked widespread criticism that the trade investigations paving the way for the new tariffs are a preordained political sham.

The saga began in February, when the nation’s highest court ruled that former President (now President) Donald Trump overstepped his executive power when he invoked the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose double-digit tariffs on nearly all imported goods from around the world. The ruling marked a major rebuke of Trump’s long-held protectionist trade agenda, which had relied heavily on flexible, unilateral tariff power to pressure trading partners and generate revenue for the U.S. Treasury. To add to the administration’s challenge, the ruling requires the federal government to refund billions in tariff payments already collected from importers.

Within 48 hours of the Supreme Court decision, Trump rolled out temporary replacement tariffs under Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act, which allows the president to impose global tariffs of up to 15% for a 150-day window. The current 10% temporary levies are set to expire on July 24, and congressional extension is widely seen as a political nonstarter. With November’s midterm elections approaching, lawmakers are reluctant to back a broad import tax that would likely push consumer prices even higher at a time when voters are already deeply frustrated by persistent high cost of living.

To solve this political and policy dilemma, the administration has turned to Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, a provision that authorizes the imposition of tariffs and other trade sanctions against nations found to engage in unfair, unjustifiable, or discriminatory trade practices. Unlike IEEPA, Section 301 has already survived judicial scrutiny: Trump used the same provision to impose sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports during his first term, and those levies withstood multiple court challenges.

Starting this week, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) will launch back-to-back public hearings for two overlapping Section 301 investigations that cover more than 99% of all U.S. imports. The first hearing, scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, will examine whether 60 global economies – ranging from Nigeria to Norway – do enough to block trade in goods produced by forced labor. USTR head Jamieson Greer argued in March that American workers and businesses have long been forced to compete against foreign producers that gain an unfair cost advantage from the “scourge of forced labor,” and the probe could result in punitive tariffs against non-compliant nations.

Next week, USTR will open a second hearing focused on whether 16 major U.S. trading partners – including China, the European Union, and Japan – are engaging in overproduction that suppresses global goods prices and puts domestic U.S. manufacturers at a competitive disadvantage. According to Erica York of the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, the economies named in this probe account for 70% of all U.S. imports. Notably, nearly all major economies targeted in the second probe are also included in the forced labor investigation, clearing multiple paths for the administration to impose new broad-based tariffs. Most major economies, including China, the EU and Japan, appear on both investigation lists.

While Greer has publicly insisted that the investigations will remain impartial and that he will not prejudge their outcomes, critics say the outcome is already predetermined. Before the probes even concluded, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly confirmed that the administration intends to replace lost original tariff revenue with new import levies collected under the Section 301 process. Trump himself has openly stated that the new tariffs will “get us more money.”

“If you believe the Treasury secretary and the president, then the cake is already baked,” explained Scott Lincicome, a trade policy expert at the libertarian Cato Institute. “These investigations will result in tariffs that approximate what the Supreme Court overruled in February.”

Critics have also flagged the accelerated timeline of the investigations as evidence of a predetermined outcome. When Trump imposed Section 301 tariffs on China during his first term, the full investigation and public comment process took nearly a year. If the administration meets its goal of imposing new tariffs by the time the temporary Section 122 levies expire, the entire process will take less than six months – less than half the timeline of the 2010s China probe.

Kenya Davis, a partner at the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner who has done pro bono work on forced labor and human trafficking issues, called the accelerated timeline suspicious. “It’s such a short timeframe,” Davis said. “It’s so condensed that it doesn’t make a lot of sense that they can do it that quickly.” Importers have already decried the entire process as a transparent sham designed to lock in Trump’s protectionist agenda regardless of the actual findings of the investigations.

While any new Section 301 tariffs will almost certainly face fresh legal challenges from importers and affected nations, trade experts say the new tariffs are far more likely to survive judicial review than the earlier IEEPA levies. The provision itself has a long track record of surviving legal challenges, and the required public investigation process provides legal cover even if the ultimate goal is explicitly to replace the struck-down tariffs.

“Even if it is a veiled — or less-than-veiled — attempt to reinitiate the IEEPA tariffs, he still has the cover of the process itself,” said Joyce Adetutu, a trade lawyer and partner at Vinson & Elkins.

For businesses and consumers, the biggest shift from the earlier IEEPA regime is that Section 301 requires formal procedural steps that prevent the kind of erratic, unilateral policy changes that marked Trump’s first tariff regime. During his earlier use of IEEPA, Trump openly threatened to impose tariffs on Canada over a critical television ad, and regularly threatened abrupt tariff changes to pressure trading partners into accepting lopsided trade deals.

“One of the reasons Trump used IEEPA is because it was just a complete blank slate” — or seemed to be before the Supreme Court ruling, Cato’s Lincicome said. He described the old authority as “a little tariff switch in the Oval Office that Trump could flip on and off anytime he wants; he wakes up in the morning and he doesn’t like a Canadian television commercial, he flips the switch … You really can’t do that with 301.”

That said, the new tariffs will still carry significant cost for American households: tariffs are paid by U.S. importers, and almost always passed through to consumers in the form of higher prices, adding additional strain to household budgets already stretched by persistent inflation.

In a sweeping move that has drawn sharp condemnation from global human rights advocates, Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa has issued a royal directive stripping 69 people of their Bahraini citizenship over accusations of sympathizing with Iran and collaborating with hostile foreign entities. The decision, legalized under a provision of Bahraini nationality law that permits citizenship revocation for individuals found to harm the kingdom’s interests or violate their duty of loyalty to the state, includes not only the accused individuals but also their dependent family members.

According to the official text of the directive, all 69 people affected are categorized as “of non-Bahraini origin.” Campaigners speaking to Middle East Eye confirm that the majority of those targeted belong to the Ajami community, long-standing ethnic populations across Gulf Arab states whose ancestry traces back to southern Iran. This mass revocation marks the first large-scale action of its kind in Bahrain in more than seven years, per records from the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD), a London-based human rights organization.

Citizenship revocation is far from a new tactic in Bahrain, BIRD’s data shows. Between 2012 and 2019, the Bahraini government stripped citizenship from at least 990 citizens, leaving most legally stateless under international human rights standards. Many of those previously disenfranchised were prominent human rights defenders, independent journalists, and respected religious scholars. In a 2019 gesture, King Hamad reinstated citizenship to 551 of those affected, but hundreds remain without formal nationality to this day.

Bahraini-Danish human rights activist Maryam al-Khawaja, a prominent critic of the Al Khalifa ruling family, called the latest decision a blatant act of political oppression. “This is a tool the Al Khalifa ruling family has used for decades to target dissidents, as well as the wider Shia population in the country,” al-Khawaja told Middle East Eye. She emphasized that the entire process proceeded without any form of due process, leaving dozens of people and their families stateless while residing within Bahrain’s borders. Without citizenship, those affected are barred from accessing core public services, including government-funded primary education, public healthcare, and formal state housing support.

Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, a senior representative of BIRD, added that many of the people named in the royal directive have never been arrested or interrogated over the alleged offenses. There is also no formal legal pathway for those affected to challenge or appeal the ruling, a flaw that Alwadaei says leaves targeted populations extremely vulnerable to abuse and often forces the separation of family members.

The mass revocation comes in the wake of two key regional and domestic developments. First, it was announced just days after King Hamad chaired a high-level emergency meeting with senior government officials to discuss new crackdown measures targeting individuals accused of “betraying the nation.” It also followed a diplomatic meeting between King Hamad and Kuwait’s foreign minister. Kuwait has been carrying out its own widespread campaign of citizenship revocation in recent months, a move that rights groups warn could impact hundreds of thousands of Kuwaiti residents, and the process has accelerated sharply since the outbreak of the Israel-U.S. war on Iran two months ago.

Al-Khawaja notes that Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) regimes have exploited the ongoing regional conflict to escalate internal repression against perceived opposition groups. “Unfortunately, since the beginning of the war on Iran, the GCC regimes have taken this as an opportunity to crack down even harder,” she said.

The regional context of the decision is unambiguous: In retaliation for the two-month-old U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, Iran launched a large-scale barrage of missiles and drones targeting GCC states, including Bahrain. The attacks left at least three Bahrainis dead and dozens more wounded, with damage reported across the island kingdom from direct impacts and falling debris from intercepted anti-missile projectiles.

Since the outbreak of the conflict, Bahraini authorities have already ramped up domestic arrests. BIRD has documented over 200 arrests since the war began, though the organization notes the true number is likely higher due to a pattern of enforced disappearances. Arrests have targeted people who participated in anti-government protests, as well as ordinary social media users who shared footage of Iranian attacks on their personal accounts.

One high-profile incident that has already sparked public outrage is the death of 32-year-old Mohamed al-Mosawi in government custody last month. Al-Mosawi was forcibly disappeared alongside several friends amid the post-war crackdown linked to Iran. Photographs and video evidence reviewed by Middle East Eye show extensive bruising and trauma across al-Mosawi’s face and body, leading protesters to accuse authorities of torturing him to death. In response to public anger, Bahraini investigators recently charged one intelligence officer with assault in connection with the interrogation that led to al-Mosawi’s death.