After six months of on-again, off-again bombing in Iran, punctuated by futile efforts to negotiate a grand bargain with the regime, President Donald Trump is returning to the more defensible strategy of economic containment.
Rather than gambling on a military breakthrough, which would probably require putting American troops on the ground in Iran, the Trump administration has decided to squeeze the mullahs by cutting them off from the rest of the world.
On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unveiled what he called an “economic onslaught.” He threatened secondary sanctions on foreign individuals, corporations and financial institutions that continue to do business with Tehran.
Bessent said his team has “mapped every node, every facilitator and every network” that has been used to evade existing sanctions. He indicated that U.S. government officials are reaching out to foreign leaders with “specific requests” and timelines for compliance. As an example, he mentioned Iran’s largest bank and said all its foreign branches must be shuttered.
“The clock just started ticking,” said Bessent, promising a “zero-leakage approach.”
Delivering that, however, will require picking a big fight with China, the largest buyer of Iranian oil, and it’s unclear whether Trump has the appetite to follow through. Thus far, U.S. sanctions have been concentrated on independent refiners and intermediaries rather than major Chinese banks or state-owned companies. Chinese President Xi Jinping is due in Washington next month for a summit. If he leaves town without having made a meaningful commitment to curbing China’s purchases of Iranian oil, Bessent’s threat will look hollow.
But even if the administration succeeds in sharply constricting Iranian exports, Trump needs to be realistic about what this can accomplish. The conflict has strengthened the hard-liners of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Ratcheting up pressure appears extremely unlikely to compel the military to surrender.
The Trump team cannot help but describe its recalibrated approach in martial terms. Bessent previewed Monday’s rollout as an “economic D-Day.” But D-Day evokes a military campaign with a clear objective: the enemy’s unconditional surrender. Economic pressure rarely works that way.
Sanctions have a poor record when it comes to hastening regime change. Comprehensive enforcement is elusive, and Iran is a practiced evader, having honed its skills for decades. Worse, ruling elites are quite good at passing the pain along to regular people. Even populations enduring profound misery rarely throw off cruel leadership. Just ask the Kim dynasty in North Korea.
That’s why containment is not really about regime change. Its immediate goal is to make an already battered Iran weaker, so that it’s less capable of threatening its neighbors and developing nuclear weapons.
As the vise tightens, Tehran’s new leaders will probably lash out militarily. Trump will need to respond forcefully to such attacks without allowing every provocation to drag the United States back into an open-ended war. Containment is a process, rather than an end state — a marathon, not a sprint.
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