Miranda Devine: Trump must reverse Bidens Iran appeasement and make the mullahs broke again
“Making Iran Broke Again” has a nice ring to it. After four years of shady appeasement by the Biden administration, Iran’s bloodthirsty regime is under pressure again — and just in the nick of time, before it finesses its nuclear weapons capability. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hammered Iran in his speech to the Economic Club of New York last week, foreshadowing harsh new sanctions and a long-overdue crackdown on the Islamist regime’s black-market oil economy. Iran’s sanctions fraud was a dirty little not-so-secret of the Biden administration, known to intelligence agencies and hedge fund traders alike. “Iran has developed a complex shadow network of financial facilitators and black-market oil shippers via a ghost fleet to sell oil, petrochemical and other commodities to finance its exports and generate hard currency,” said Bessent. When Donald Trump left office in 2021, Iran was on its knees. Savage sanctions aimed at strangling Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and funding of terrorists had reduced Iran’s oil exports to a trickle.Trump had also torn up the diabolical Iran nuclear deal, the Obama administration’s so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Under Joe Biden, everything changed.
He eased off on sanctions enforcement, betrayed Iranian dissidents, re-animated the nuclear deal and returned $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets in September 2023, a month before the Oct.7 attack on Israel. Biden and his handlers were so fixated on winning re-election that nothing mattered except maintaining high global oil supplies so they could keep a lid on soaring US gas prices that were helping fuel inflation. So, as Bessent points out with contempt, the Biden administration, for base political reasons, turned a blind eye to the black market in co-mingled oil that continued to enrich Iran, whose exports went from a low of 100,000 barrels per day at the end of Trump’s first term to more than 1.7 million barrels a day under Biden. ...