The United States has revoked a license that allowed Iran to sell oil, the Treasury Department said, moving to squeeze Tehran's finances after a spate of attacks on tankers near the Strait of Hormuz. The reversal pulls back a concession granted only weeks earlier and underscores how quickly the recent, tentative calm between the two countries can fray.
What was undone
The waiver, issued in June, had permitted the sale of Iranian crude and related products and the services needed to ship them, and had been expected to run into August as part of a negotiating window, CNBC reported. Analysts had said it could unlock billions of dollars for Iran by freeing up oil it had struggled to export under sanctions. Revoking it, with a wind-down period for deals already under way, cuts off that revenue channel again, Bloomberg reported.
The trigger
US officials tied the decision directly to the recent attacks on commercial vessels in and around the Strait of Hormuz. A US official said the arrangement with Iran was "performance-based" and that Iran would benefit only if it behaved, calling the strikes in the strait "wholly unacceptable," The Times of Israel reported. No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, and Iran has not publicly commented on them; the United States and Britain have pointed to Iran, an accusation Tehran has not confirmed.
The stakes
The waiver had been part of a broader understanding reached after this year's confrontation between Iran and the United States and Israel, an effort to lower the temperature and open space for talks. Its removal is a setback to that process, though US officials said negotiators were still working toward a fuller agreement. For Iran, whose economy has been battered by years of sanctions, the loss of oil income is a real blow; much of its recent export sales had gone to buyers in China.
A fragile calm
The sequence, a concession granted, then withdrawn within weeks after violence at sea, captures how brittle the current arrangement is. The Strait of Hormuz, through which a large share of the world's oil passes, remains the pressure point: incidents there can quickly translate into sanctions, price moves and political friction. Oil prices, which had eased when the waiver was granted, firmed on news of its reversal. Whether the two sides can keep talking while trading punishments in the Gulf is now the open question.
