President Trump is once again betting that Iran's economy will crack before his military options do, and Iran is insisting that he's wrong. After months of stalemated war and a collapsed interim deal, Trump is leaning away from new strikes and toward tighter sanctions and a naval blockade, convinced fresh financial pressure will do more than bombs have, reports the Wall Street Journal. "They have no money," Trump told reporters Monday. "Iran is broke, totally broke."
But a spokesman for Iran's foreign ministry maintains that the US has a "compulsive addiction to sanctions," even though they don't work. "Whenever Washington proves itself incapable of pursuing diplomacy, it retreats into sanctions; and whenever those sanctions fail to produce results, it simply increases the dose," wrote Esmail Baghaei on X. "The real risk is that American politicians, clinging to this bad habit, will instead strangle their own remaining chances of a less humiliating exit from a crisis of their own making."
In assessing what it calls a "pivot" in strategy back to sanctions, the AP sees a potential risk for the US: Economic penalties are typically a long-game strategy. "The ultimate question will be how far the United States is willing to go to constrict Iran's oil trade and threaten third countries with severe sanctions—and whether it has the patience to test whether the economic pain will change the regime's behavior," says Juan Zarate, a deputy national security adviser in the administration of George W. Bush.
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