Iran vows to fight Donald Trump's max pressure to slash its oil exports

Iran vowed to take its own "measures" that will doom US President Donald Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign to cripple the OPEC nation's revenue from crude.

"We will adopt measures according to our conditions," energy minister Mohsen Paknejad said, according to a Feb. 9 statement published by the oil ministry's Shana news service. "The more restrictive they are, the more complicated our measures will become."

The US Treasury threw the latest salvo on Feb. 6 with new sanctions on entities that it said helped ship Iranian crude to China, the largest importer of its crude. That came two days after Trump directed Treasury to resume the "maximum pressure" campaign he started in his first term as US president to deny Iran and its proxies access to oil revenue.

"This is a defeated policy. They have tried it before and brought no result. If they retry it, they will bring no result and fail," Paknejad said.

After Trump tightened sanctions on Iranian oil exports during his first term, Iran's oil exports dropped from as much as 2.8 million b/d in April 2018 to only about 260,000 b/d in September 2019 and 250,000 b/d in 2020, according to S&P Global Commodities at Sea data(opens in a new tab).

The shipments gradually recovered under the Biden administration to 1.8 million b/d in September 2024 but have since been falling to 1.2 million b/d by January, according to the ship-tracking data.

Washington has accused Iran of funding destabilizing groups and organizations in the Middle East.

During his first term, Trump pursued a maximum-pressure campaign that drove Iranian crude output to as low as 1.95 million b/d in August 2020, according to the Platts OPEC+ survey by Commodity Insights. By December, it was back up to 3.22 million b/d, according to the latest tally in the survey.