You're making a distinction without a difference. US sanctions are designed to completely cut off the target country or company from the global economy - even

You're making a distinction without a difference. US sanctions are designed to completely cut off the target country or company from the global economy - even from doing business with foreign companies that have no obvious connection to the US. The US does this through secondary sanctions. If a European company does business in Iran, it will suddenly find itself unable to do business with anyone in Europe. Its bank will terminate its account, even if the bank doesn't do business in the US, because the bank is afraid of getting cut off from its business partners. US sanctions are designed to cascade in this way. The end result is that Iran is almost completely cut off from the world economy, because the US decided that nobody anywhere in the world should trade with Iran. I don't think any other country in the world applies secondary sanctions this aggressively. When the US pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, it effectively forced the EU to pull out of the deal as well. The deal was oversight of Iranian uranium enrichment in exchange for sanctions relief. But US sanctions scared off EU companies from doing business with Iran, so Iran got no real sanctions relief from the EU. It's a sign of how politically weak the EU is that it didn't respond in kind to US threats to sanction EU companies that did business with Iran. The EU effectively allowed the US to dictate EU trade policy. But I wouldn't assume that this situation will continue indefinitely. Other countries will eventually respond to the US' overreach here.