MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is expected to unveil another set of economic pressure tactics against Iran today.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
President Trump promised a campaign of economic warfare and pledged to go after other countries that extend Iran a lifeline. The U.S. already has extensive sanctions on Iran, stretching back nearly five decades.
MARTIN: With us is NPR White House correspondent Emily Feng to explain what might be down the line. Good morning, Emily.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: So there was a new round of U.S. sanctions as recently as June on any entities that helped Iran evade penalties. There's been an American naval blockade for months, cutting off most goods from the outside and blocking Iranian oil exports. What more can the U.S. actually do?
FENG: So what the U.S. has not really done yet and which President Trump seemed to suggest in a post on his social media site Truth Social last week is to put more pressure on countries and their governments who are host to entities that provide cash flow for Iran. And in an editorial published in the Financial Times on Sunday, Treasury Secretary Bessent wrote obliquely of countries which give Iran an economic lifeline and said they should, quote, "consider the consequences" of further doing so.
Now, one of these countries, which he didn't mention specifically, was the United Arab Emirates. But this month, the UAE said it was cutting off trade with Iran. The second major country is China, especially the region of Hong Kong, and Bessent specifically criticized China last week for buying most of Iran's oil in the past.
MARTIN: So if the U.S. has had years of sanctions designed to put economic pressure on Iran, what impact have they had?
FENG: Right. I talked to Alan Eyre about this. He's a longtime American diplomat, and he's a former member of the U.S.' nuclear negotiating team until 2015.
ALAN EYRE: And when it comes to sanctions, we've done the low-hanging fruit, the mid-hanging fruit, the high-hanging fruit, the tree. You know, so there are no new sanctions that are effective.
FENG: So he's skeptical this economic sanctions playbook will work in changing the Iranian regime because when he was with the State Department, Eyre says the logic, you know, the argument behind sanctions was this.
EYRE: If you immiserate enough Iranian people long enough and hard enough, they will put effective political pressure on their own regime to compromise on red lines. That's fallacious. That's not going to happen.
FENG: Instead, he and other analysts I've spoken to have noted this war has actually empowered even more aggressive ideological hard-liners, and he believes if there were mass protests to happen again in Iran, Iran's leaders would simply just massacre those demonstrators again.
MARTIN: Which they have already done.
FENG: Right.
MARTIN: Are there any other cards the U.S. might have to play beyond sanctions that could have leverage over Iran?
FENG: So a big thing would be getting back more control over the Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. Navy is escorting more cargo ships through that channel, but at a really high cost. Both countries, the U.S. and Iran, claim control over the strait, but in reality, Iran still has the upper hand, and only a fraction of the oil and the ships that used to transit the strait is now making its way through.
In the past, there were some diplomatic breakthroughs, like in 2015, we had something called the JCPOA or the Iran nuclear deal that was finalized under the Obama administration, where Iran agreed to limit their nuclear program for sanctions relief. But Trump had the U.S. withdraw from that agreement. This term, Trump has tried U.S. military pressure, you know, weeks of bombing. But we know that's not led to regime change, and now the administration is saying it's going to try economic pressure again.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Emily Feng. Emily, thank you.
FENG: Thanks, Michel. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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