WASHINGTON Just hours after President Donald Trump s bellicose tweet that Iran was playing with fire, his administration rolled out narrow financial sanctions, just as the previous administration had done a year ago.

Todays sanctions really represent a very, very strong stand against the actions that Iran has been taking, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Friday.

Former Obama administration officials agree but wonder what makes them so much stronger now than they had been under the previous president.

This is not a meaningless action. This is the sort of thing you should do, said Richard Nephew, who was a State Department Iranian sanctions expert in the Obama administration. This is also not a dramatic escalation. Its not really different from what the Obama administration was doing.

The question is: Is this it? Or is this the beginning of an escalation? wondered Ilan Goldenberg, who worked on Iranian issues at the Pentagon during Obamas first term.

Friday morning, the Treasury Departments Office of Foreign Assets Control released a list of 25 individuals and companies that are now off-limits to Americans for business or banking. According to Treasury, they are involved with Irans ballistic missile program or its support of terrorism in the region.

These designations mark yet another step in our continued effort to aggressively target Irans ballistic missile program and terrorism-related activities, said a senior Trump administration official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity.

A second official said these are just initial steps, and that the Trump national security team is still studying the situation to explore additional possible actions. The official, however, would not describe what those might entail.

Just over a year ago, then-president Barack Obama was criticized by many Republicans for imposing similar sanctions against 11 individuals and companies for a ballistic missile test, even as he was announcing the lifting of broader sanctions from Iran as a result of its agreement to dismantle its nuclear program.

On Friday, though, senior officials in the Trump administration took pains to point out that the new sanctions were unrelated to the nuclear deal just as they did Wednesday, two hours after national security adviser Michael Flynn seemed to suggest the opposite in a statement he read from the White House briefing room.

President Trump has severely criticized the various agreements reached between Iran and the Obama administration, as well as the United Nations as being weak and ineffective, Flynn said. As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice.