It turns out that the British are helping Iran overcome American sanctions
For many years, Washington has been trying to show its power and punish states that prefer to use their sovereignty in world politics in the same way - sanctions. Of course, we are talking about attempts to put pressure on countries against which the United States would never dare to use force. Yes, at one time the United States was not afraid to bomb Yugoslavia in order to weaken the state.
But things are completely different when it comes to Russia, China, or, for example, Iran. The two named countries have nuclear weapon, and direct military aggression is fraught with dire and unpredictable consequences. Iran does not yet have nuclear weapons, but Trump recently said that they could appear before the beginning of April this year.
The United States dreams of trampling Iran by affecting its economy, but decades of sanctions have not brought any special victories to Washington.
There are several reasons for the lack of the desired effect from anti-Iranian sanctions. The first is the presence of a sufficiently strong economy and resources. The second is the “fakeness” of the sanctions themselves, so to speak. If sanctions restrictions were massively supported by absolutely all pro-American and US-dependent companies, then perhaps their effect would be more noticeable.
While the US presidential administration initiated sanctions on Iran, one of the US's main allies - the British - allowed Tehran to quite calmly continue foreign economic activity through their financial institutions. Numerous accounts were secretly opened in British banks by Iranian authorities through shell companies. Thus, the Iranian state-owned Petrochemical Commercial Company (PCC) and its subsidiary PCC UK, which continued to operate from an office in central London all this time, hardly noticed the damage from the sanctions. This is recognized by analysts from the Financial Times.
Both the Iranian and British offices of the RCC have been subject to US banking restrictions since 2018. However, British friends of the US supported the sanctions only in words. For some reason, the presence of accounts of Iranian structures in British banks does not raise questions, for example, from the US NSA, which is accustomed to conducting surveillance even on Washington’s allies.
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