President Donald Trump said on Monday any country that does business with Iran will face a tariff rate of 25% on any trade with the US, as Washington weighs a response to the situation in Iran which is seeing its biggest anti-government protests in years.
"Effective immediately, any Country doing business with the Islamic Republic of Iran will pay a Tariff of 25% on any and all business being done with the United States of America," Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
Tariffs are paid by US importers of goods from those countries. Iran, a member of the OPEC oil producing group, has been heavily sanctioned by Washington for years. It exports much of its oil to China, with Turkey, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and India among its other top trading partners.
"This Order is final and conclusive," Trump said without providing any further detail.
There was no official documentation from the White House of the policy on its website, nor information about the legal authority Trump would use to impose the tariffs, or whether they would be aimed at all of Iran's trading partners. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The Chinese embassy in Washington criticized Trump's approach, saying China will take "all necessary measures" to safeguard its interests and opposed "any illicit unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction."
"China's position against the indiscriminate imposition of tariffs is consistent and clear. Tariff wars and trade wars have no winners, and coercion and pressure cannot solve problems," a spokesperson of the Chinese embassy in Washington said on X.
Japan and South Korea, which agreed on trade deals with the US last year, said on Tuesday they are closely monitoring the development.
"We ... plan to take any necessary measures once the specific actions of the US government become clear," South Korea's trade ministry said in a statement.
Japan’s Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki told reporters that Tokyo will "carefully examine the specific content of any measures as they become clear, as well as their potential impact on Japan, and will respond appropriately."
Iran, which had a 12-day war with US ally Israel last year and whose nuclear facilities the US military bombed in June, is seeing its biggest anti-government demonstrations in years.
US may meet Iranian officials, Trump says
Trump has said the US may meet Iranian officials and that he was in contact with Iran's opposition, while piling pressure on its leaders, including threatening military action.
Tehran said on Monday it was keeping communication channels with Washington open as Trump considered how to respond to the situation in Iran, which has posed one of the gravest tests of clerical rule in the country since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Demonstrations evolved from complaints about dire economic hardships to defiant calls for the fall of the deeply entrenched clerical establishment. US-based rights group HRANA said it had verified the deaths of 599 people - 510 protesters and 89 security personnel - since the protests began on December 28.
While air strikes were one of many alternatives open to Trump, "diplomacy is always the first option for the president," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday.
During the course of his second term in office, Trump has often threatened and imposed tariffs on other countries over their ties with US adversaries and over trade policies that he has described as unfair to Washington.
Trump's trade policy is under legal pressure as the US Supreme Court is considering striking down a broad swathe of Trump's existing tariffs.
Iran exported products to 147 trading partners in 2022, according to World Bank's most recent data.
The tariffs come as the West has moved increasingly more to isolate Iran with travel bans and asset freezes against Iranian actors linked with the Islamic Republic regime.
Currently, more than 230 Iranians, including the country’s interior minister, Ahmad Vahidi, members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as well as more than 40 other entities, have been sanctioned by the European Union.
Trump's tariff rollout comes as anti-regime protests have erupted in all 31 of Iran's provinces over the past two weeks, leading to crackdowns and state-backed violence against demonstrators.
Some media outlets have reported that around 2,000 people have died during the protests. However, HRANA has only confirmed that 646 people have been killed during the course of the protests, 505 of them demonstrators.
Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, in a Sunday interview on Fox News, appeared to confirm the higher number, saying that Iranians "suffered more casualties than the US did after the 9/11 attack" in the past 48 hours.
"This is a moment that is defining. This is an opportunity to liberate that nation," Pahlavi added.