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On 22 June 2026, the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued Iran General Licence X, authorising the transactions ordinarily incident and necessary to the production, sale, delivery and offloading of Iranian-origin crude oil, petroleum products and petrochemicals through 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on 21 August 2026. Read against its own text, the instrument is a broad but time-limited and conditional waiver, not a structural reversal of US policy. Its weight lies in three operative features: the breadth of the authorised value chain, the explicit permission for US-dollar settlement, and the precise shape of its jurisdictional carve-out.

The operative clause is deliberately wide. Paragraph (a) authorises all transactions prohibited by the listed authorities that are ordinarily incident and necessary to the production, sale, delivery or offloading of Iranian-origin crude, petroleum products and petrochemicals, expressly including transactions involving vessels blocked under those authorities. The licence therefore reaches not only the commodity but the maritime and financial apparatus that moves it.
Note 1 enumerates that apparatus. It covers the safe docking and anchoring of carrying vessels, crew health and safety, emergency repairs and environmental mitigation, and the service stack on which the trade depends: vessel management, crewing, bunkering, piloting, registration, flagging, insurance, classification and salvage. It further confirms that the relief extends to products produced by entities already sanctioned under the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations (31 CFR part 560), the Iranian Financial Sanctions Regulations (31 CFR part 561) and the Global Terrorism Sanctions Regulations (31 CFR part 594).
Two further provisions sharpen the picture. Note 2 authorises the importation into the United States of Iranian-origin crude, petroleum products and petrochemicals, but only where such importation is itself ordinarily incident and necessary to a sale, delivery or offloading authorised by the licence. Paragraph (b) permits any payment owed to Iran, the Government of Iran or a blocked person for authorised purchases to be made in US-dollar-denominated funds. The dollar provision is the more consequential of the two: it removes, for the licence period, a primary point of friction that has long pushed Iranian barrels into discounted, non-dollar channels.

The carve-out is narrower and more specific than early commentary suggested. Paragraph (c) withholds authorisation from any transaction involving a person located in or organised under the laws of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Republic of Cuba, the Covered Regions of Ukraine as defined by Executive Order 14065, or the Crimea Region of Ukraine as defined by Executive Order 13685, together with any entity owned or controlled by, or in a joint venture with, such persons. It also preserves every other prohibition under other Executive orders or under 31 CFR chapter V that the licence does not expressly reference.
The observation that follows from the text is precise: the exclusions are framed by counterparty jurisdiction, not by destination, and neither the People’s Republic of China nor the Russian Federation appears among them. The licence names no buyer. For its duration, transactions incident to authorised Iranian sales therefore sit outside US secondary-sanctions exposure regardless of the purchasing state, save for the four carved-out jurisdictions.

General Licence X operates against an unusually dense stack of authorities. It lifts, for its period and within its scope, prohibitions arising under seven regulatory parts, including the Russian Harmful Foreign Activities (31 CFR part 587), Ukraine/Russia-Related (31 CFR part 589) and Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferators (31 CFR part 544) regimes alongside the three Iran-specific parts and the Iranian Sector and Human Rights Abuses Sanctions Regulations (31 CFR part 562), and under four Executive orders: 13846, 13876, 13902 and 13949. The instrument is signed by OFAC Director Bradley T. Smith.
This breadth is the point. The Iranian oil trade has been constrained less by any single prohibition than by the cumulative, overlapping architecture that General Licence X temporarily stands down.

The policy framing comes from the Treasury Secretary’s own statement of 22 June, which tied the action to a memorandum of understanding reached with Tehran earlier in the month and to ongoing talks in Switzerland. According to that statement, Iran committed to free and open transit through the Strait of Hormuz and to permitting International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors into the country. The licence is, on this account, an instrument of a negotiation rather than a standalone concession.
The historical baseline is set by OFAC’s own record. Direct commercial importation of Iranian-origin petroleum into the United States has been barred since Executive Order 12613 took effect on 29 October 1987. General Licence X reopens that channel, narrowly and temporarily, for the first time in nearly four decades.
The inflection point is fixed. Absent renewal, the authorities listed in the licence snap back at 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on 21 August 2026, and the importation, dollar-settlement and service-stack authorisations lapse with them.