Defend Democracy Press — EU to create special payment channels with Iran despite US sanctions – Mogherini

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Mike Norman
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European Union Foreign Affairs Chief Federica Mogherini Says the EU Signatories Remain Committed to the Nuclear Deal With Iran That the US Has Quit. The Group Is Working to Create Special Payment Channels to Do Business With Iran. Mogherini Read From a Statement Following a Ministerial Meeting of the Remaining Signatories of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Deal at the Sidelines of the UN General Assembly. The Statement by the Five Nations –Russia, the UK, Germany, China and France– Confirms That Iran Has Been Complying With Its End of the Agreement. With That in Mind, the EU Is Working to Create the Means to Continue Doing Business With Iran Legally, at a Time When the US Is Looking to Stifle Tehran’s Oil Exports With Sanctions, Aiming Ultimately to Bring Them Down to Zero....

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In a stunning vote of "no confidence" in the US monopoly over global payment infrastructure, one month ago Germany’s foreign minister Heiko Maas called for the creation of a new payments system independent of the US that would allow Brussels to be independent in its financial operations from Washington and as a means of rescuing the nuclear deal between Iran and the west.

Writing in the German daily Handelsblatt, Maas said "Europe should not allow the US to act over our heads and at our expense. For that reason it’s essential that we strengthen European autonomy by establishing payment channels that are independent of the US, creating a European Monetary Fund and building up an independent Swift system," he wrote.

Maas said it was vital for Europe to stick with the Iran deal. "Every day the agreement continues to exist is better than the highly explosive crisis that otherwise threatens the Middle East," he said, with the unspoken message was even clearer: Europe no longer wants to be a vassal state to US monopoly over global payments, and will now aggressively pursue its own "SWIFT" network that is not subservient to Washington's every whim.

Many discounted the proposal as being far too aggressive: after all, a direct assault on SWIFT, and Washington, would be seen by the rest of the world as clear mutiny against a US-dominated global regime, and could potentially spark a crisis of confidence in the reserve status of the dollar, resulting in unpredictable, and dire, consequences.

However, despite the diplomatic consequences, Europe was intent on creating some loophole to the US ability to weaponize the global currency of account at will, something observed most recently as part of Trump's latest sanctions on Iran, and as a result, late on Monday, the European Union said that it would establish a special payment channel to allow European and other companies to legally continue financial transactions with Iran while avoiding exposure to U.S. sanctions.

The move, as the WSJ notes, "is a direct rebuke of President Trump’s policy on Iran and his decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal in May," and sets the stage for a confrontation between the U.S. and Europe over the treatment of Iran, the payment for Iran oil, and potentially, jeopardizing the reserve currency status of the dollar itself....

Dominance is the real meaning of US global hegemony. This requires the submission of everyone else.

The other operative word is "euro."

Such transactions, presumably in euros and pounds sterling, would not be transparent to American authorities.

And, in a potentially massive development, the system would be likely be open to Russia and China as well as it would enable the world's economies to trade with each other, fully independent of SWIFT.

Europe would thus provide an infrastructure for legal, secure sanctions-busting — and a guarantee that the transactions would not be reported to American regulators....

In any case, creating "a defensible banking architecture" may well be the end goal for the Europeans, China and Russia, anyway because, as noted above, Iran is merely a convenient pretext: after all, the nuclear agreement is one of the few things that unite the EU, China and Russia against the U.S.

But, as Bershidsky notes, "working to undermine the dollar’s global dominance isn’t ultimately about Iran at all. In his recent State of the European Union speech, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker called for strengthening the euro’s international role and moving away from traditional dollar invoicing in foreign trade."

China and Russia have long sought the same thing, but it’s only with Europe, home of the world’s second biggest reserve currency, that they stand a chance of challenging American dominance....