5 countries with the longest ongoing US sanctions

4. Iran: Decades of showdowns with the US

The first sanctions against Iran began in 1979 after the Iranian hostage crisis, and have been renewed and expanded since then. President Ronald Reagan imposed comprehensive sanctions on Iran in 1987 as a result of the country’s support for international terrorism and aggressive actions against shipping in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war.
 
Under Bill Clinton’s presidency in 1995 further restrictions were instilled due to Iran’s refusal to comply with International Atomic Energy Agency regulations concerning its nuclear program. These restrictions prohibit all trade and investment by US citizens and companies in Iran.
 
The United Nations has passed four rounds of sanctions against Iran for refusing to stop the enrichment of uranium, which could be processed into fuel suitable for a nuclear weapon. And on New Year’s Eve this year President Obama signed new financial restrictions aimed at making it difficult for countries to buy Iranian oil, reports the Monitor. These most recent sanctions target foreign firms purchasing Iranian oil, which is the largest source of revenue for the country.

The European Union has announced Iranian oil sanctions, in hopes of further choking finances and bringing Iran to the negotiating table, reports the Monitor.  Recent Iranian threats of retaliation in response to stricter sanctions include closing the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most important shipping channel, which sees 20 percent of all oil transport.  

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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