News Desk, The Cradle.
Bessent said that illegal US sanctions are a replacement for a war of aggression that has failed to break Tehran.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC on 20 August that Washington will likely “not restart” large-scale military operations against Iran, as the White House shifts to a campaign of maximum economic sanctions.
“If we are doing the maximum economic pressure, then that means that likely there will not be a large-scale kinetic restart,” Bessent said in an interview with CNBC’s Squawk on the Street news program.
Trump had announced hours earlier on Truth Social that Washington would impose major economic penalties on any country extending Tehran what he called “any type of lifeline.”
“This will be an ECONOMIC D-DAY, and we need all of our Allies to stand with the United States of America to isolate, and defeat, the Iran threat,” Trump wrote.
Bessent said he would lay out the details of the plan at a press conference, telling CNBC that the message to every US ally would be: “You are either with us or against us.”
“If you insist on doing business with [Iran], either transferring money, buying their oil or doing seaborne ship transfers, then the US Treasury and the US government … will put its full might and force toward enforcing against you,” he said.
He described the campaign as “the greatest coordinated economic isolation in the history of the world.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi dismissed the campaign the same day, writing on X that it would deliver Washington nothing but “further defeat.”
“The so-called ‘Economic D-Day’ is a diversion from America’s own crisis: unprecedented debt & surging interest costs,” Araghchi wrote, describing US “economic terrorism” as a threat to the global economy.
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said Washington had reached for economic warfare only after its military campaign failed to deliver.
“They claim Iran is on the verge of defeat and hanging by a thread, yet they are begging all their allies to help them,” he wrote on X, adding that the US had “named their next failure an ‘economic war.’”
Vice-Chairman of the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden Hussein Askary notes that the US naval blockade imposed in April has pushed Iran to shift its trade overland, sharply increasing freight traffic on the China–Iran railway and raising the strategic value of Eurasian land corridors as Tehran works to keep supply routes open beyond the reach of maritime pressure.
The Pentagon is reviewing whether to scale back its presence in Persian Gulf states after Iranian retaliatory strikes battered the largest US bases overseas, with sources saying a westward pullback is under consideration.
A regional intelligence source told Press TV that the Pentagon has concluded no military plan exists that could guarantee open shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, which carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil.
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