The second round of sanctions is going to be in November. I predict Iran will withdraw from the nuclear deal early 2019 and restart their nuclear program. War with Iran could begin spring/summer 2019.
Russia, Turkey, India, China and many others will not abide to unilateral U.S. sanctions on Iran. They will not bow to secondary sanctions if the U.S. tries to impose those.
Haley and Pompeo visited Asia and demanded that China and India, two of Iran's biggest oil customers, stop buying Iranian oil. Both countries said meh. They're begging China and India to not increase their imports when, in November, those sanctions bite, when some of Iran's customers stop buying and when more Iranian oil comes to the market.
Those talks happened some months ago and both countries asked for more time to think about the problem. China has now in principle
agreed to the Trump request - but only after it made the necessary preparations:
The U.S. has been unable to persuade China to cut Iranian oil imports, according to two officials familiar with the negotiations ...
Beijing has, however, agreed not to ramp up purchases of Iranian crude, according to the officials, ...
...
China -- the world’s top crude buyer and Iran’s No. 1 customer -- has said previously that it opposed unilateral sanctions and lifted monthly oil imports from the country by 26 percent in July. It accounted for 35 percent the Iranian exports last month, according to ship-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg.
India seems to have had
the same idea:
India’s monthly oil imports from Iran surged by about 30 percent to a record 768,000 barrels per day (bpd) in July, as state refiners’ intake surged ahead of U.S. sanctions in November, preliminary tanker arrival data obtained by Reuters showed.
...
July volumes were about 85 percent higher than year ago shipments of about 415,000 bpd, the data showed.
When in November the hard oil sanction against buyers of Iranian oil go into effect
India and China will insist to keep their current volume flowing. Both have already increased their buys from Iran. They can now promise to Trump that they will not increase their imports from Iran because they already upped those by a very large amount. Iran exports between 2.2 to 2.8 million barrels per day. At least half of that will continue to flow to its two biggest customers. By that measure the sanctions already failed.
Trump can not even use the jurisdiction over the U.S. dollar to stop these trades. The deals with India and China are made under bilateral contracts in local currencies and futures contracts than can now be
bought and sold in Shanghai where they are denominated in yuan.
In addition to the sanctions, Trump has launched a number of shady to outright brutal initiatives against Iran. It sent people to Europe
to claim that Iran is behind some terror plots in Europe, and that this is enough reason to end the deal. But:
"European officials, some skeptical that Iran is behind the plots, say the nuclear deal benefits the region." Still, some European leaders have no backbone and submit to U.S. pressure.
A U.S.-Israeli joint operation was set up to
increase internal pressure in Iran. It will try to influence protesters in Iran and to incite terrorism.
This is likely an early sign of that initiative:
A large shipment of weapons incl anti-aircraft guns, 7000 cannon projectiles, 73mm antitank cannons, other ammo found in east of #Iran. Kerman prosecutor gen. says they belonged to anti-government groups.