TEHRAN -- Iran on Friday
condemned U.S. sanctions against six Iranians and one Iranian group for allegedly trying to influence the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
“Iran condemns these new sanctions as a continuation of the failed policy of Trump’s maximum pressure that is desperate and illegitimate,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said on Twitter, referring to former U.S. President Donald Trump.
Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and imposed the most draconian sanctions ever on the Islamic Republic which brought the agreement to the verge of collapse.
U.S. President Joe Biden has denounced his predecessor’s withdrawal but has shown an interest in maintaining the key elements of the sanctions as a pressure tool against Iran.
While Biden has promised a departure from the volatility of Trump-era foreign policy, his staff choices have been taken as a troubling sign for the administration’s broader sanctions policy going forward.
Richard Nephew, the lead sanctions expert on the Obama State Department’s negotiating team for the 2015 nuclear deal, has joined the Biden administration as deputy Iran envoy.
Many observers have said Nephew’s appointment suggests that rather than immediately returning to the JCPOA nuclear deal, the Biden administration will finesse sanctions illegally imposed by Trump to pressure Iran into an onerous, reworked agreement that Tehran is unlikely to join.
Unlike most others in Washington’s foreign policy establishment, Nephew has made the rare admission that even targeted sanctions on so-called bad actors destroy economies, hurting civilian populations in the long run. He also takes credit for contributing to shortages in medicine and medical devices in Iran through sanctions he helped design, making these necessities too costly for the average Iranian.
In his 2017 book, The Art of Sanctions: A View from the Field, Nephew explains how sanctions are meant to inflict pain so intolerable that it forces “the target” to acquiesce to U.S. demands, adding that the casualties and damage of sanctions can be less visible and seem less destructive than those of military conflict.
Nephew’s appointment in March was berated in Iran as the “proof of the Biden administration’s maliciousness”, with one lawmaker saying that it showed “Americans’ hatred of Iran is not limited to Republicans or Democrats”.
Khatibzadeh on Thursday also

slammed a statement on Iran from the U.S., France, Germany, the UK and Persian Gulf Cooperation Council countries, calling it “fabricated, pretentious and illegitimate.”
The U.S. government “as the violator of Resolution 2231 and the party that withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” is responsible for the current situation, Khatibzadeh said.
In a statement on Thursday, the U.S. Treasury Department claimed that “state-sponsored Iranian cyber actors” between August and November 2020 “executed an online operation to intimidate and influence American voters, and to undermine voter confidence and sow discord”.
The move came a day after American, British and Australian officials baselessly claimed that hackers linked to the Iranian government had been targeting a “broad range of victims” inside the U.S., including by deploying ransomware.
Khatibzadeh said, “Such accusations addressed by the U.S. government, who itself has a long history of meddling in other countries’ affairs in different shapes and forms, are baseless.”
The spokesman separately condemned his French counterpart Anne-Claire Legendre’s call on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to send a “strong message” to Iran and urge the Islamic Republic return to its nuclear obligations “without delay”.
The French official’s comments concerned Iran’s legitimate remedial nuclear steps that the Islamic Republic has been taking in retaliation for counterparty non-commitment to a 2015 nuclear deal between the Islamic Republic and others.
Iran initiated the counter-steps in 2019, after observing a year of strategic patience in the face of the U.S. withdrawal from the deal, its re-introduction of the sanctions that the agreement had lifted, and others including France’s refusal to object to the sanctions.
Khatibzadeh said the French official’s remarks were meant to “influence the IAEA’s attitude,” saying such meddlesome comments only serve to “tarnish the agency’s reputation as a technical and specialist UN organization”.
The spokesman also reacted to an anti-Iran statement issued on Thursday following a meeting in Riyadh between U.S. point man on Iran Robert Malley, European envoys, and officials from the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council.
The statement repeated their Iranophobic remarks concerning the Islamic Republic’s nuclear work and its regional influence.
Khatibzadeh highlighted the countries’ history of regional trouble-making and interference, saying the meeting and its concluding statement was “so factitious and lacking in legitimacy that does not warrant a reaction”.
The hostile gestures by the U.S. and its allies come as Iran and the P4+1 – China, France, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Germany – head to the Austrian capital on November 29 to resume talks that were halted in June to remove American sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Hussein Amir-Abdollahian reiterated Thursday that the main goal of the upcoming negotiations is to remove all illegal sanctions on Tehran.
Iran’s top negotiator Ali Baqeri-Kani said the success of the talks will depend on the other sides’ “firm determination and practical readiness to remove the sanctions”.