Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will take the podium at 2 p.m. ET on Monday to announce what he has promised will be “the toughest sanctions in history” against Iran. Before he does, Washington and Tehran have been trading defiant statements. Nobody is firing, and nobody is talking peace either. The war is close to six months old.
Bessent is also pressing China to cooperate. That matters for families well beyond the Gulf, because China buys more than 80 percent of Iran’s shipped oil, according to 2025 data from the analytics firm Kpler. Beijing has urged diplomacy.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Esmaeil Baghaei, answered on Saturday. The coming U.S. announcement, he said, was an “assertion of extraterritorial sovereignty over every independent member state of the United Nations.” In a post on X he added: “Such secondary sanctions find no foundation in international law.”
President Donald Trump has warned of economic consequences for any country that gives Iran “any type of lifeline.” On Friday he said Washington was watching “what happens.” Of Iran, he said: “They would love to make a deal, but they’re not ready to make the right deal, in my opinion.”
Iran’s armed forces chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Ali Abdollahi, promised on Friday to meet enemy threats with “crushing, punishing and devastating responses.” President Masoud Pezeshkian struck a different tone. “It would be better to end the war today, when we are powerful and have dignity,” he said, according to the ISNA news agency.
A strait nearly shut
Oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz have all but stopped. Iran is holding onto its leverage by threatening to strike unauthorized tankers that try to pass. Thousands of seafarers are stranded on hundreds of vessels, and ship-tracking data showed only four commodity ships sailing the strait on Thursday. None was a large crude carrier or an LNG tanker.
Iran did allow a number of Iraqi tankers through after repeated requests from Baghdad, the state news agency IRNA reported on Saturday. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the U.S. military has helped move a seven-day average of 8 million barrels a day through the strait. Before the war the figure was more than 20 million, about one barrel in every five consumed worldwide.
The human toll is heavy. Thousands have died, among them 168 Iranian schoolchildren killed on the first day. The U.S. has reported 18 military personnel killed and more than 750 wounded.
U.S. strikes have badly hurt Iran’s economy and wrecked its navy and air force. Tehran still has enough missiles and drones to interfere with tanker traffic and hit regional rivals. Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s main negotiator in the mediated talks, admitted the pressure late on Thursday while speaking to Iranian and Iraqi businesspeople. “No matter how much military power we have, we won’t survive if people are hungry and we don’t have financial turnover, economic growth and national production,” he said, according to IRNA.
U.N. inspectors have been shut out of Iran since 2025, so the state of its nuclear program remains uncertain.
