U.S. Waives Iran Oil Sanctions for 60 Days as Hormuz Traffic Returns
A U.S. Treasury licence lets Iran sell oil through August 21, the firmest step yet from the Switzerland talks, even as Washington and Tehran clash over nuclear inspections.
The U.S. Treasury issued a 60-day waiver on Monday clearing Iranian oil to be produced, shipped and sold, including for the first time in years into the United States, after a first round of talks in Switzerland that both governments described as productive.
The licence runs through August 21 and is the most concrete step yet under the 60-day memorandum Washington and Tehran signed on June 17 to wind down their war. It landed alongside a sharper, still-unsettled dispute over whether Iran has actually agreed to let nuclear inspectors back onto its soil.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent laid out the terms on social media. Iran has committed to free and open transit in the Strait of Hormuz and to permit International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors into their country
, he wrote, adding that Treasury has issued a temporary 60-day general licence authorising the production, delivery and sale of Iranian oil.
The licence covers crude, petrochemical and petroleum products of Iranian origin, Al Jazeera reported. It pointedly does not authorise dealings tied to North Korea, Cuba or Russian-occupied Ukraine.
That is the part both sides agree on. The nuclear question is where the accounts split.
Vice President JD Vance, speaking before leaving the Swiss resort of Bürgenstock, said Iran had agreed to readmit IAEA inspectors and that conversations with the agency could resume as soon as this week. Iran’s foreign ministry told reporters the opposite: that Tehran took on no new commitments and did not negotiate the nuclear file during roughly 18 hours of discussions, a contradiction CNN reported as the talks broke up. Vance kept his guard up. You can’t trust anybody’s words. You have to trust what they actually do,
he said.
The clearest sign that something has shifted is on the water. Shortly before the waiver, the Strait of Hormuz — the chokepoint for a large share of the world’s seaborne oil and gas — was filling with traffic again, two days after Iran said it had closed the passage in response to Israeli strikes on Lebanon. Four Qatari-operated LNG tankers and two supertankers, each able to carry up to four million barrels of crude, moved through on Monday, according to ship-tracking data cited by Al Jazeera. Daily transits remain below the 125 crossings seen before the fighting, the shipping firm Clarksons said, but the direction is up.
For readers far from the Gulf, that is the real stake of a diplomatic document. The strait carries a large slice of the oil and liquefied gas that sets prices at filling stations and power plants across three continents. A licence signed in Washington and a shipping lane reopening near Oman are, in the end, the same story.
The waiver follows the roadmap the two sides reached last week, when negotiators agreed a 60-day path to a final deal, and the earlier brinkmanship that saw Iran’s delegation walk out after a Trump threat. Each step has been smaller and more technical than the last, which may be the point.
Iran’s foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, framed the day in his own terms, crediting Pakistani and Qatari mediation and casting a Lebanon “deconfliction cell” as the agreement’s first real test.
Post by @araghchi
That test will come quickly. The waiver expires on August 21, the inspectors have not yet arrived, and the Lebanon ceasefire that underpins the arrangement is only as durable as the next strike. Tehran is selling oil again. Whether it is also opening its nuclear sites is, for now, a matter of who you believe.
