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New anti-Iran bans kill cooperation chances: Analyst

Tuesday, 19 January 2016 5:11 AM [ Last Update: Tuesday, 19 January 2016 5:12 AM ]

US Secretary of State John Kerry (L) speaks with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in Vienna, Austria, January 16, 2016. (Photo by AFP)

Press TV has interviewed Hillary Mann Leverett, a professor of international affairs at Pennsylvania State University’s School of International Affairs, and Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East adviser to the US Congress, to discuss the reasons behind a decision by the United States to impose new sanctions against Iran.

Leverett says the imposition of the new sanctions is rather “perplexing” to her because, in this particular case, the Obama administration could have opted not to make such a “discretionary” decision.

She says, “The United States did not mean to go forward to impose these sanctions;” the decision, she says, was about “addressing concerns among domestic constituencies here in the United States as well as the concerns among our so-called allies in the Persian Gulf… and others.”

She says the launching of the implementation process of a deal between Iran and the P5+1 – which includes the US – provided an opportunity for Washington to cooperate with Tehran on a range of regional and global issues, but the new sanctions, she says, kill such chances.

“For the United States to impose more sanctions just interrupts the momentum, prevents us from really focusing where we need to focus on these crisis areas in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan,” she says.

Katzman, for his part, says that the US had decided about the new anti-Iran sanctions around three weeks ago, but delayed the announcement of the bans to after a prisoner swap between Tehran and Washington and the implementation of the deal.

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