After months of on-again, off-again military strikes and rhetoric ranging from dovish to apocalyptic, President Trump has turned to a new strategy for Iran — economic warfare.
The U.S. has already been maintaining a naval blockade of Iran, and Trump is taking the strategy further, calling for a D-Day on the Iranian economy. On Monday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced what he portrayed as crippling new sanctions on Iran. “Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone,” he said in describing the new “Operation Economic Outcast.”
In addition to existing energy sanctions, the U.S. says it will include technology, shipping, and other sectors. The administration is making calls to different countries to join this economic isolation and threatening nations that still do business with Iran, including European countries and China, with secondary sanctions.
It’s not clear, though, what the follow-through will be, which renders the economic D-Day billing inapt; what made D-Day so decisive is that it wasn’t announced in advance, with the details TBD.
Surely, Iranian intransigence is based, in part, on the belief that Trump is always bluffing, and so overselling this latest tack is counterproductive. It didn’t help our credibility that Secretary Bessent said we aren’t acting on the sanctions immediately because we don’t want “to blow up the global financial system.” (Bessent has been using Treasury funds to buy back bonds in an effort to calm investors’ concerns about America’s ballooning $40 trillion debt.)
That said, we look to be in a better place than a couple of months ago. U.S. operations to get more ships out of the Strait of Hormuz have had some success, although it’s unclear how much (the price of Brent crude is still elevated compared to pre-war levels, but lower than it was during the height of the conflict). Meanwhile, reports from inside Iran point to a faltering economy that is experiencing runaway inflation, even before a further economic squeeze. At a minimum, the move to economic warfare is preferable to airstrikes of diminishing returns with a vacillating strategy or quitting the conflict entirely.
We shouldn’t expect immediate results, though, either in terms of the collapse of the Islamist regime — or at least its surrender at the negotiating table. The ideologically rigid rulers of Iran have proven resilient through decades of sanctions and pounding from the joint might of the U.S. and Israeli air forces, as well as the targeted assassinations of its top leaders.
It’s true that the level of economic pain that Trump is seeking to inflict on Iran is more intense than anything the regime has been forced to navigate to this point. Yet, the same basic dynamic applies as during previous rounds of pressure on the regime. The leadership of Iran is radical and more shielded from the effects of a bad economy than are the people whose welfare the regime is indifferent to. Importantly, it still has the guns and, presumably, the willingness to use them during a popular uprising, as it did in last year’s massacres.
Iran also could decide to escalate, such as by increasing attacks on the Gulf states. Given that Trump has indicated time and again that he has no appetite for a renewal of large-scale military operations, the decision of how far to go to protect these leading oil producers would put the president in a difficult spot.
Ultimately, for any strategy of economic warfare to be effective, it will take months or even years of sustained effort — and there is no guarantee that it will work even then. This will be a drain on resources — how long do we want to go without an aircraft carrier in the Western Pacific? — and attention. Trump, whose patience with this conflict has been somewhat surprising to this point, will need to dig in for the long haul.