Washington, August 28 — Six months after the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes against Iran on February 28, the conflict has settled into a grinding economic siege that is reshaping the country’s leadership and daily reality. The opening attack killed an IRGC commander and an armed forces chief of staff, and a cascade of further strikes followed in the weeks that followed.
In the aftermath, Tehran appointed Mojtaba, son of the late Supreme Leader, as his successor just over a week after the assassination. Six months on, his public appearances remain unverified, his portrait is carried through city squares, and decrees are issued in his name while rumors about his condition persist. The state has also had to rebuild its command structure in the middle of the war, formalising a new military leadership on August 10 that includes a new IRGC chief and a new chief of staff.
These appointments appear to favour loyalty and continuity over change, signalling that Tehran does not intend to soften its posture. The clearest sign that the war has returned to its economic origins is the campaign Washington has intensified since suspending strikes in early August.
US officials had already branded the broader effort “Economic Fury”; on August 24, the Treasury launched an expanded campaign aimed at severing Iran’s remaining financial links with the outside world. Secondary sanctions now target those moving Iranian oil, measures against its “shadow fleet” and financial networks, and greater enforcement of international sanctions. Iran’s oil exports, near 1.8 million barrels a day before the war, have fallen below half a million; inflation is approaching 90 percent, with food prices more than double what they were a year ago.
The siege lands on an economy whose troubles were never solely the work of sanctions, but on a structure built over decades from US sanctions dating to the 1980s to UN Security Council resolutions since 2006. Neither the 25-year, $400bn partnership with China nor the strategic treaty signed with Russia in early 2025 delivered the stability Tehran sought.
Before the war, the late Supreme Leader and a senior political figure had acknowledged that sanctions alone could not account for the depth of the crisis and that governance bore its share. The economic weapon works in part because the state it targets was already structurally exposed, and Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation on February 28 and, six months on, it has not reopened, fusing the naval blockade with the closure into a single chokehold on trade.
That structural exposure is forcing a longstanding divergence into the open, as Iran’s leadership has long explained its crises through two competing narratives — one advanced by the political leadership acknowledging failures of economic governance, the other promoted by the securit. The practical upshot is that survival is becoming more costly, and the question is no longer whether Iran can survive military attack, but whether it can withstand an economic siege with no sign of lifting.
What to watch next is how the intensifying sanctions will reshape Iran’s alliances and whether the leadership vacuum around Mojtaba will deepen as the economic pressure mounts. The next move may come from Tehran’s partners in Beijing and Moscow, or from the resilience of ordinary Iranians facing food prices that have more than doubled. The story is still unfolding, and the next chapter will likely be written at sea, in the financial networks that keep the country connected to the world.
