One key foreign policy goal of the current U.S. government is to initiate regime change in Iran by crippling its economy to such a degree that popular unrest removes the current power structures in the country, particularly the near-omnipresent IRGC. To this end, the past few weeks have seen the U.S. end all waivers on importing oil from Iran, designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organisation, and sanction 14 individuals and 17 entities linked to Iran’s shadowy Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research. All of this followed the U.S.’s momentous withdrawal last May from the Iran nuclear deal. The IRGC believes that its only chance of avoiding this fate is to widen the existing divisions between the U.S. and the European Union (EU) so that it can generate export revenues from Europe, in addition to those it can rely on from the historically sanctions-busting […]