NYT: Trump faces limits on Iran sanctions

President Trump’s “Economic D-Day” is intended to break the stalemate with Iran. But decades of sanctions have done little to change the country’s behavior.

Soon after taking office last year, President Trump issued a directive laying out his “maximum economic pressure” policy against Iran.

Yet Mr. Trump seems to have decided that even maximum pressure can be turned up to 11. He calls his new plan “Economic D-Day,” and it is meant to break the stalemate in the U.S. conflict with Iran, The New York Times writes.

On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced new sanctions against 60 Iranian and Iran-linked entities, individuals and vessels, and demanded the closing of all branches of a major Iranian bank that operates in many countries.

But his demands that other nations stop doing business with Iran underscore the difficulty in trying to impose sanctions on Iran’s economy to the point of collapse.

Thoroughly enforcing sanctions is notoriously hard, and in Iran’s case would require messy run-ins with allies and powerful rivals capable of retaliation, most notably China. Imposing a full ban on global trade with Iran, as Mr. Bessent called for, only multiplies those challenges. Mr. Bessent himself admitted doing so could roil the global economy.

Those factors help explain why U.S. officials are still struggling to strangle Iran’s economy despite the mountain of sanctions Washington has heaped on the country over the past five decades.

“We’ve done all the low-hanging, medium-hanging and high-hanging fruit,” said Alan Eyre, a former U.S. diplomat and Iran expert now with the Middle East Institute. “We’ve cut down the whole sanctions tree. There’s nothing left.”

All that provides reason for skepticism about Mr. Trump’s latest plan for coercing Iran through economic pain.

Iran’s economy took a toll as oil exports plunged.

Nearly 50 years of American sanctions, dating to the Carter administration, have done little to change Iran’s behavior.

‘Maximum pressure means…’

Mr. Trump has bombarded the country with new sanctions. He targeted virtually the entire Iranian economy, expanding penalties to sectors like construction, mining, textiles and manufacturing. Even third-country businesses or individuals that transacted with dozens of major Iranian companies could be subject to American sanctions.

Most significantly, in 2019 Mr. Trump sought to cut off Iran’s oil revenue entirely, announcing that any country that imported Iranian crude would be subject to severe U.S. penalties, potentially including loss of access to the U.S. financial system.

“Maximum pressure means maximum pressure,” an April 2019 State Department fact sheet declared.

But Iran has grown skilled at evading American sanctions, including through the use of a so-called shadow fleet of tankers that ship its crude to foreign buyers.

Mr. Trump has never picked the sort of fights with nations like China and India that analysts say would be necessary to enforce such a policy. On Monday, Mr. Bessent said that no country would be exempt from the new approach.

But analysts like Mr. Eyre were skeptical. The new policy is unlikely to succeed, he said, “unless President Trump wants to make full Chinese compliance, for instance, the centerpiece of U.S. relations” with Beijing. “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Mr. Bessent acknowledged the problem. Asked why he was merely issuing vague warnings to Iran’s trading partners rather than taking immediate action against them, he said he hoped to avoid confrontation.

“Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?” he said.

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