“The EU is a market economy we protect freedom of enterprise,” a senior Commission official said. “The purpose of the blocking statute is not to oblige any company to invest but actually it is to make sure their business decisions remain free and not imposed upon by legislation, which we consider unlawful.” [...]
The most direct conflicts may not come until November, when U.S. sanctions intended to cripple Iran’s oil industry come back into effect. European officials have already said that they are working to find ways to keep Iran’s oil business alive, including new financing mechanisms perhaps through European central banks. China has already said it will continue buying oil from Iran. [...]
European officials, under pressure for details about how their blocking statute would work in practice, acknowledged that their legislation would not fully blunt the impact of U.S. sanctions. But said they wanted to provide as much reassurance as possible to European businesses. They also said there was continuing strong solidarity with Russia and China to preserve the economic benefits in the JCPOA that convinced Tehran to curtail its nuclear weapons program. [...]
However, European officials noted that the U.S. had rarely tried active enforcement of secondary sanctions and had met with little success in the few attempts in the past. The Europeans said they were hoping for a political deal as occurred in the 1990s during a similar dispute over unilateral U.S. sanctions against Cuba and Iran.
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