Former Iranian parliamentarian Mohammad-Javad Larijani told the Iranian Labor News Agency (ILNA) on Tuesday that Iran refuses to hold talks with the Trump administration because it fears the U.S. would use economic leverage to control Tehran, as it is allegedly doing with Ukraine.
“The statements saying that we will certainly have a war if we do not negotiate with the U.S. are groundless,” said Larijani, who is a high-ranking adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“We must understand that the U.S. administration will not lift the sanctions through negotiations but instead will make demands going against our sovereignty and freedom, which we will have to accept in exchange for lifting the restrictions. This is exactly what it is doing with Ukraine now,” he said.
Larijani was evidently alluding to President Donald Trump’s demands for Ukraine to settle its war debts by giving the U.S. access to its valuable mineral deposits.
The Iranian regime vacillates between dismissing U.S. sanctions as an irrelevant trifle and blaming those very same sanctions as crushing pressure that causes every single problem with the Iranian economy. Larijani was in the former mode on Tuesday, suggesting that if Tehran remains stubbornly defiant, Washington will soon realize how “useless” sanctions are.
Larijani’s boss, Ayatollah Khamenei, said in early February that negotiations with the U.S. on any issue of substance were off the table for the foreseeable future because diplomacy with America was ostensibly “dishonorable.”
“Some people pretend that if we sit at the negotiating table, some problem will be solved, but the fact that we must understand correctly is that negotiating with the U.S. has no effect on solving the country’s problems,” Khamenei groused.
The Trump administration does not appear to be optimistic about negotiations either. On Monday, the Treasury Department announced a new round of sanctions on over 30 people, companies, and ships for selling Iranian petroleum products via a “shadow fleet” of tankers.
“Iran continues to rely on a shadowy network of vessels, shippers, and brokers to facilitate its oil sales and fund its destabilizing activities. The United States will use all our available tools to target all aspects of Iran’s oil supply chain, and anyone who deals in Iranian oil exposes themselves to significant sanctions risk,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Some of the targeted entities were Iranian, including the National Iranian Oil Company and Iranian Oil Terminals Company. Other targets included oil brokers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Hong Kong, and shipping companies in India and China.
According to U.S. government estimates, Iran has been able to squeeze up to $54 billion in annual income from its banned oil using its shadow fleet operation. Iran’s oil output hit a six-year high in 2024 after falling to nearly zero in the first year of the first Trump administration. This prompted then-presidential candidate Trump to accuse former President Joe Biden of allowing Iran to flout sanctions with relative impunity.
Trump won the 2024 election and returned to the White House with promises to restore his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. The State Department said on Monday that the new sanctions against Iranian oil were an effort to deliver on that promise by disrupting Iran’s “efforts to amass oil revenues to fund terrorists’ activities.”
“As long as Iran devotes its energy revenues to financing attacks on our allies, supporting terrorism around the world, or pursuing other destabilizing actions, we will use all the tools at our disposal to hold the regime accountable,” said State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce.
Writing at Middle East Eye on Sunday, former Iranian economist Hadi Kahalzadeh – now a research fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University – predicted Trump’s “maximum pressure” approach against Iran would fail. In support of his prediction, he argued that the Iranian regime has proven itself “resilient” enough to withstand public demonstrations of anger stemming from Iran’s terrible economy.
“A key reason sanctions failed to spur internal revolt lies in Iran’s privilege-based welfare system, which insulates politically influential groups from hardship,” Kahalzadeh explained.
“While sanctions exacerbate hardship, the ruling bloc, military, security forces, and skilled workers in the public sector remain relatively protected, while the 60 percent working in the informal sector bear the brunt of inflation without a cohesive platform for political action,” he said.
However, Kahalzadeh’s prediction was based in part on Iran using its shadow fleet to generate oil revenue in defiance of sanctions. If the sanctions announced the day after he published his analysis are able to significantly interfere with shadow fleet oil shipments, those calculations could change.
Read the full article here