At 12:01am on 17 July, General License X1, the wind-down authorisation that had replaced Iran's revoked oil waiver on 7 July, expired with nothing issued in its place.1
General License X1 was a countdown, not a reprieve. When OFAC revoked the underlying oil waiver, General License X, it granted a short window for existing Iranian-oil transactions to wind down; that window has now closed. No replacement licence was published, which shuts the last lawful channel for Iranian oil trade.
Washington faced a fork and took the harder path: it let the relief lapse rather than extend it. The expiry lands alongside the same week's arms-network designation, the non-kinetic half of an escalation whose kinetic half is the inland bombing. A wind-down licence that simply expires, with no successor, tells oil traders and Iranian counterparties that no relief is coming while the strikes continue.
