Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Marziyeh Afkham earlier this week brushed aside statements from U.S. officials insisting that Washington can easily reverse the erosion in sanctions entailed by the recent Geneva interim agreement.

“We think that based on the negotiations (held between Iran and the world powers) and the Joint Plan of Action (agreed by them) the structure of sanctions has cracked and its collapse has started,” Afkham told reporters in Tehran on Tuesday…Afkham expressed the hope that sanctions would be removed in their entirety during the path due to be paved by Tehran and the world powers towards a full settlement of nuclear differences, and before taking the final step.

The White House has insisted that its sanctions relief is reversible since literally the evening when the deal was announced, and the claim was reiterated this week by President Barack Obama.

And so what we’ve said is that we do not loosen any of the core sanctions; we provide a small window through which they can access some revenue, but we can control it and it is reversible. And during the course of these six months, if and when Iran shows itself not to be abiding by this agreement, not to be negotiating in good faith, we can reverse them and tighten them even further.

Skeptics have in contrast emphasized the possibility that any weakening of the sanctions regime would trigger a feeding frenzy of companies and nations racing into Iran’s economy in order to avoid being left behind, a scenario ridiculed as “fanciful” by administration-linked analysts. In addition to the worry that the administration misjudged the robustness of the sanctions regime, this week saw mounting evidence that the White House had also underestimated the magnitude of the sanctions relief it was committed to providing. Israel’s left-leaning Haaretz recently revealed that American officials have admitted to their Israeli counterparts that Iran is set to receive a windfall more than double what administration figures had publicly estimated. CNN yesterday described how Iran oil exports spiked by 10% in November.

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