The United States and Iran continued exchanging defiant rhetoric ahead of America’s scheduled announcement of new economic sanctions that could impact the Islamic Republic and Tehran’s most important trading partners, including China. He, however, gave little detail about how the economic warfare will take place.
In a Sunday op-ed in the Economic Times, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that an “economic D-Day is coming for Iran,” as he threatened nations against doing business with Tehran.
“The Islamic Republic has subsisted by dressing extortion as security guarantees. It has drawn strength from a calculus that regards Iranian retaliation as certain and American enforcement as negotiable. Under President Trump, that era is over. And those who fear the danger of defying Tehran ought not to discount the cost of testing Washington,” he added. Iran will regard any country’s participation in or support for America’s economic war against the Iranian people as an act of war. Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian has also called for a diplomatic solution.
China, which buys more than 80 per cent of Iran’s shipped oil, according to 2025 data from analytics firm Kpler, has urged diplomacy.
“The world should understand that our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains the tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone,” Bessent said, echoing US President Donald Trump’s remarks, who first threatened an “economic D-Day” against Iran last week. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said that the imminent US announcement of new economic sanctions on Iran was an “assertion of extraterritorial sovereignty over every independent member state of the United Nations. “Such secondary sanctions find no foundation in international law,” he said in a post on X. In a social media post, Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said, “If the economic war continues, not a single drop of oil will be exported, neither through the Strait of Hormuz nor from anywhere in the Persian Gulf.
