What Iran’s latest bluster over new Trump sanctions really means

Iran is waxing furious over Team Trump’s latest round of sanctions, which is an excellent sign that they were the way to go.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced that Tehran won’t even think of negotiating with an administration “afflicted by mental retardation.” Bloomberg’s Bobby Ghosh wonders if what really got Rouhani’s goat is that he wasn’t sanctioned along with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other top officials — the message being that Rouhani is just a figurehead (which he is).

Critics carp that Khamenei won’t feel much pain, since he has no overseas assets. Maybe so, though the supposedly ascetic ayatollah controls a trillion-dollar business empire built on confiscated properties, as Reuters reported years ago.

In any case, these sanctions deliver a public slap to match the invisible-to-the-world cyberattacks that hit Iran after President Trump opted against a military response to Iran’s shootdown of a US drone last week.

Iran also claims that sanctioning Khamenei and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif “is the permanent closure of the path of diplomacy.” Nonsense: Talks are possible as soon as Tehran decides it wants them.

Team Trump’s sanctions strategy is hitting Iran hard. Tehran hopes to lure the prez into military strikes to change the equation, but he’s not falling for it (unless Iran’s foolish enough to target American lives).

The regime hopes to wait out Trump, and negotiate with a Democratic president after 2020 — if it can weather the ongoing collapse of its economy. If it can’t, that “permanent closure” will prove completely temporary.

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