Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democratic member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, has penned a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressing concern that the Trump administration “may be willing to consider trading away legally binding sanctions on Iranian oil purchases in the course of trade negotiations with the People’s Republic of China.”
We must agree with the general concern. U.S. policy toward Red China is not perfectly consistent. The administration has already proved willing, for example, to let the PRC buy second-class microchips from the U.S.—not super very good chips, but very good chips—that U.S. firms should not be allowed to sell to that country.
Can now continue
Krishnamoorthi (shown above) is harking back to a June 24 Truth Social post by the president saying, after an Iran-Israel ceasefire, that “China can now continue to purchase oil from Iran.”
Because reporters and others then asked whether Trump was via social-media post acting to rescind Trump-initiated U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil, a White House spokesman stressed that the president was simply stating the fact—the fact being that China buys and will buy Iranian oil regardless of U.S. sanctions on Iran—not endorsing the fact (Reuters, June 24, 2025).
Trump was drawing attention to no attempts by Iran so far to close the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers, as a closure would have been hard for China, the world’s top importer of Iranian oil, a senior White House official told Reuters.
“The president continues to call on China and all countries to import our state-of-the-art oil rather than import Iranian oil in violation of U.S. sanctions,” the official said….
Any relaxation of sanctions enforcement on Iran would mark a U.S. policy shift after Trump said in February he was re-imposing maximum pressure on Iran, aiming to drive its oil exports to zero, over its nuclear program and funding of militants across the Middle East.
Trump’s thinking in June wasn’t crystal clear if we go only by his social-media post: “China can now continue to purchase Oil from Iran. Hopefully, they will be purchasing plenty from the U.S., also.” But the post wasn’t quite announcing a new series of administrative actions to undo a previous series of administrative actions either.
May be or is
In his letter to Bessent and Rubio, K.—let me call him “K.” to save typing time—first suggests that the Trump administration “may be willing to consider trading away legally-binding sanctions on Iranian oil purchases” (my italics).
Later in the letter, though, K. says that via his post the president “is endorsing and encouraging the deviation from NSPM-2 in his statement. [Still my italics.] President Trump’s statement not only contradicts the policies of his own administration but also endangers the national security of the United States by channeling resources to a dangerous regime, enabling the PRC to thrive on cheap energy, and establishing a precedent that U.S. sanctions may be openly violated without repercussion.”
NSPM-2 is “President Trump’s…National Security Presidential Memorandum from February 2025,” which, in conjunction with an executive order from Trump’s first term, seeks “to neutralize Iran’s aggressive behavior by denying and disrupting the country’s access to financial and other resources that enable the regime’s destructive behavior. Sanctions on illegal activity that threaten the national security of the United States should not be compromised or traded away for leverage.”
Fortunately or unfortunately, no administration policy forbids the president from banging out sloppy social-media posts that are susceptible to more than one interpretation.
I think we can all agree—we can, can’t we, all?—that the president’s executive orders are as a matter of routine much more carefully drafted than his hectic and peculiarly capitalized social-media posts. Trump’s social-media posts aren’t being vetted by batteries of lawyers and advisors and are certainly not being vetted by any proofreader. Also important to keep in mind is that none of the executive orders includes a postscript to the effect “But keep an eye on my Truth Social posts just in case I casually undo this order at some point.”
K. leaps to the worst possible conclusion and does not, in his letter, really even consider the possibility of a more charitable interpretation of the president’s online peripatetics.
Non-negotiables
Yet K.’s worry that in trade talks with the PRC, President Trump and his negotiators may be willing to put matters affecting U.S. security on the negotiating table “that should not be compromised or traded away for leverage” is justified.
In any case, Congressman Krishnamoorthi would like Bessent and Rubio to conduct, I guess, a serious discussion with the president—the letter includes four questions to get the conversation started—and make sure that President Trump is not about to abandon his administration’s sanctions on Iranian oil.
Do that, Bessent and Rubio, and let us know the result.
