Friday, March 21, 2025
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has out[1]lined his plans for economic warfare against the Islamic Republic, saying his goal is to “Make Iran Broke Again” and he used those capital letters in his speech text to make his aim crystal clear. In a speech March 7 to the Economic Club of New York a forum treasury secretaries have long used to outline their plans Bessent said his plan was not to lob a new sanction every few weeks over Iran’s bow but to fire massive barrages of sanctions and enforcement actions that will quickly sink the ship of state.
He said it was actually dangerous to apply sanctions slowly and modestly because that simply gave the target country time in which to find new means of evasion. Bessent said, “Last September, President Trump expressed his view that overuse of sanctions could affect the US dollar’s supremacy. I couldn’t agree more and would add that, not unlike the overuse of antibiotics, the target becomes immune and mutates.
Lackadaisical sanctions simply create new markets, which must then be sanctioned and so on.” He said, “Per President Trump’s guidance, sanctions will be used explicitly and aggressively for immediate maximum impact. They will be carefully monitored to ensure that they are achieving specific objectives.” Bessent continued: “Last month, the White House announced its maximum pressure campaign on Iran designed to collapse its already buckling economy. The Iranian economy is in disarray: 35% official inflation; has a currency that has depreciated 60% in the last 12 months; and an ongoing energy crisis.
I know a few things about currency devaluations, and if I were an Iranian, I would get all of my money out of the rial now. “This precarious state exists before our Maximum Pressure campaign, designed to collapse Iranian oil exports from the current 1.5-1.6, million barrels per day, back to the trickle they were when President Trump left office.” Actually, according to TankerTrackers.com, Iran’s oil exports were 1.5 million barrels a day in January 2021, the last month of President Trump’s first term, not exactly a “trickle.”
In the best month of Trump’s “maximum pressure” effort, Iran’s oil exports ran at 500,000 barrels a day in May 2019, after which the Islamic Republic learned ways to evade sanctions and boost oil exports. Bessent said, “Iran has developed a complex shadow network of financial facilitators and black-market oil shippers via a ghost fleet to sell oil, petrochemical and other commodities to finance its exports and generate hard currency. As such, we have elevated a sanctions campaign against this export infrastructure, targeting all stages of Iran’s oil supply chain….
“We will close off Iran’s access to the international financial system by targeting regional parties that facilitate the transfer of its revenues. Treasury is prepared to engage in frank discussions with these countries. We are going to shut down Iran’s oil sector and drone manufacturing capabilities.” (The reference to closing drone-manufacturing plants was something new. Bessent didn’t explain how financial measures would accomplish that.) He summed up: “We have predetermined benchmarks and timelines,” although he did not identify any of them so the public will not know if he is succeeding or failing to make his goals. “Making Iran Broke Again will mark the beginning of our updated sanctions policy. Watch this space. If economic security is national security, the regime in Tehran will have neither.
