Iran’s security chief calls participation in campaign an ‘act of war’
The Trump administration has launched what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calls “Operation Economic Outcast,” a sanctions campaign designed to cut Iran off from what remains of the global economy and threaten foreign governments, banks, and companies with penalties if they continue doing business with Tehran. The initiative, advertised as “economic D-day,” comes after months of war failed to force Iran’s capitulation or collapse, and as Iran’s economy has been battered by years of sanctions, war, and a months-long US naval blockade, according to Sina Toossi, writing in The Guardian.
The campaign escalates economic pressure on a country already weakened by years of sanctions and ongoing conflict. Iranian officials have acknowledged that the country’s oil exports and access to foreign currency have been severely constrained, and that ordinary Iranians are enduring high inflation, currency depreciation, and worsening living standards.
Iran’s leadership has offered a mixed response. President Masoud Pezeshkian has said Iran should seek peace while it can still negotiate from a position of “power and dignity.” At the same time, Mohsen Rezaei, the new head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, has taken a harder line, calling participation in Washington’s economic campaign an “act of war.”
Rezaei said Tehran would first try to persuade neighboring states not to participate in the campaign, but warned their interests would be threatened if they did. He further warned that Iran could prevent Gulf oil exports through routes designed to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Toossi, a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy, characterized those statements as reflecting “a consistent strategic logic: Iran cannot defeat the US economically, but it can try to make the economic strangulation of Iran prohibitively expensive for Washington and the countries it needs to enforce it.”
The campaign faces a significant obstacle in China, the principal buyer of Iranian oil. Beijing has ordered Chinese firms not to comply with US sanctions targeting Chinese buyers of Iranian oil, and China’s top court recently highlighted a ruling penalizing a Singaporean company for complying with US sanctions. China has warned it will take “all necessary measures” if Chinese interests are targeted.
Bessent acknowledged the tension between the campaign’s stated goals and the risk of broader economic disruption. “Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?” he said when asked why Washington was not immediately imposing its most sweeping secondary sanctions.
The announcement comes as the Trump administration faces midterm elections, which Toossi identified as a reason to avoid further escalation that could disrupt Gulf energy flows and send fuel prices higher. Toossi argued that Washington’s strategy has repeated an earlier pattern: applying pressure without accounting for Iran’s ability to respond.
He noted that after Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran in 2018 in an attempt to secure more favorable terms, Iran expanded its nuclear program. Military conflict was intended to force Tehran to accept US terms, Toossi wrote, but instead the war expanded and the Strait of Hormuz became a central source of Iranian leverage.
Iran’s stated strategy, according to Iranian officials cited by Toossi, is to seek an agreement while demonstrating that it can withstand the pressure without capitulating or abandoning its core terms. Tehran’s gamble, Toossi wrote, is that it can “endure and reroute enough commerce while imposing enough costs that Washington and its partners eventually prefer a settlement to continued confrontation.”