Khamenei, One of Most Evil People in History, is Dead
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Wednesday, September 2, 2026 05:42
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The Incoherence of Trump’s Past Week of Foreign Policy
As the war with Iran drags on, the president is in disagreement with the vice president, military leaders, and long-standing American allies.
By David A. Graham | August 17, 2026, 5:36 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/08/trump-foreign-policy-i
ncoherence-iran/688312/
A memorandum of understanding between Iran and the United States, reached in June and intended to provide breathing room to end the conflict between the two countries, expired today. The agreement will be little missed: A cease-fire had effectively ended within about three weeks of its signing, and the MOU had failed to produce fruitful negotiations or a real opening of the Strait of Hormuz.
The president’s actions in the days leading up to the deadline demonstrate that his approach to the world, always contingent and improvisational, has lost its last shred of coherence. The White House cannot agree on the goals of the Iran war, much less on how to achieve them. The president is clashing with long-standing allies, in conflict with his vice president on the aims of the war, and publicly at odds with uniformed commanders over conditions for American troops stationed abroad.
Trump on Friday called on Americans to accept higher gasoline prices as the cost of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. He posted this morning that the “number one Goal is, and always will be, that Iran cannot have, in any way, shape, or form, a Nuclear Weapon”—even though his administration assessed before the war that Iran was not actively building weapons, even though the White House hasn’t offered any explanation for how the war will prevent the regime from restarting its weapons program, and even though the war may make Iran’s desire for a nuclear arsenal only more urgent. Meanwhile, Vice President Vance says that lowering fuel prices is actually now “goal No. 1” of the war.
In practice, the real aim of any diplomatic or military action now is resuming ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran seized early in the conflict—a risk foreseen by many analysts but not by Trump. For weeks now, Trump’s basic choice has been clear: Either launch a much larger military operation, including ground troops, or else surrender de facto control of the strait permanently.
The president refuses to accept this. He continues to complain that the Iranians are bad-faith negotiators, which is surely true but was well known before the war. During a speech on Friday, Trump said that “pretty soon, I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.” This is dishonest, delusional, or both. Such a declaration would contradict Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s insistence on the neutrality of the strait as well as Trump’s repeated statements that the U.S. should not act as a global policeman. But it’s also beside the point, because the United States has no means to control the strait.
The conditions for those U.S. troops already in the region are reportedly awful. Aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been at sea for nearly nine months, sailors report shortages of basic supplies, malfunctioning systems, and faltering mental health. When Trump was asked Friday about service members’ families who have publicly voiced their worries, he insisted that they were not concerned: “No, they’re not,” he said, adding that the ship’s deployment had not gone on “nearly long enough” yet. In a sign that military brass takes these worries seriously, the admiral overseeing the war visited the carrier this weekend and acknowledged mental-health issues.
With the U.S. unwilling or unable to break the Hormuz deadlock, Oman has embarked on negotiations with Iran to create a toll system for ships. This morning, Trump threatened to expand the war with strikes against that country. “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” he told Fox News. Trump’s frustration with Oman is understandable, yet a threat to attack a venerable regional ally
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‘There is no breaking point’: The problem with Trump’s plan to economically strangle Iran
As the administration promises unprecedented economic isolation, former US officials and Iran experts warn Tehran may be willing to absorb far more pain than Washington anticipates.
By Megan Messerly and Sam Sutton | August 18, 2026 04:06 PM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/18/there-no-breaking-point-probl
em-with-trumps-plan-teconomically-strangle-iran-01040781
President Donald Trump is waiting for Iran to cave to his economic pressure. Tehran may be willing to wait even longer.
Even as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promises a level of economic isolation “never seen before,” former Trump administration officials, U.S. ambassadors and other Middle East experts are skeptical that tightening the economic vise will force Iran to relinquish its desire to toll ships passing through the State of Hormuz and make the other concessions Trump is demanding to bring an end to the war.
“It’s an attrition campaign, and I am sure Treasury tweaks this or that to fill gaps or expand coverage of sanctions,” said James Jeffrey, a former ambassador who served in the Middle East during three presidential administrations, including Trump’s first term. “But, it’s hard to believe [there will be] something decisive after 20 years of U.S. sanctions and Iranian experience of going around them.”
It’s an acknowledgement that underscores the asymmetry of the situation. The Trump administration is staring down a consequential midterm election amid an unpopular war that has sent oil prices back up to roughly $90 a barrel and helped push long-term borrowing costs to their highest level in nearly two decades as hope dims that a peace deal is near.
Iran’s leaders, meanwhile, see the conflict as existential, giving Tehran reason to absorb the extraordinary economic pain rather than accept terms it believes could imperil the regime — especially as U.S. inflation remains elevated and treasuries sell off.
The yield on 30-year U.S. government bonds, a figure Trump has in the past been attuned to, jumped on Tuesday to its highest level since just before the global financial crisis.
The increase in the yield to its highest level in nearly two decades isn’t solely because of the six-month war; global fuel shortages and broader instability have kept energy prices higher for longer, increasing the threat of persistent inflation. And that’s heaped even more risk on global bond markets that have repeatedly blanched at Trump-related shocks.
“We are in a situation where we’re spending more and more to finance more and more,” said Julia Coronado, founder of MacroPolicy Perspectives. And the war has created “a riskier world full of more frictions, full of more supply shocks.”
Iran’s outsized incentive to muscle through the pain is partly why some former administration officials doubt that the naval blockade, while unprecedented in its scale in the modern era or whatever new strategies Bessent may unveil, will change Iran’s calculus.
“I think the economic pressure would need to hit them in new ways we haven’t seen so far to change the mindset of the regime,” said one former Trump administration official, granted anonymity to candidly assess the impact of the U.S.’s economic pressure campaign.
The administration has yet to indicate what further action it plans to take, but options include going after major Chinese banks that facilitate Iran’s oil trade, expand secondary sanctions on countries doing business with Iran and confiscating Iranian assets under U.S. jurisdiction instead of just freezing them.
Iranian leaders publicly mocked U.S. efforts to sanction them into submission.
“Americans think squeezing Iran harder will win concessions that were never part of the agreement,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, posted on X Tuesday.
“Bessent and [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth are way out of their league,” he wrote. “Stop waiting for the clown crew to pull a rabbit out of their hat and clean up the
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Midweek Update #24: The USA Is Not A Serious Country
In Strategy And Planning The USA Is A Self-Destructive Mess: Here Is A Short-Term Way To Stop The Bleeding
By Phillips P. OBrien
Aug 19, 2026
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-24-the-usa-is-no
t
The USA in many ways has not been a serious country during this entire Iran War. It started it without a strategy, with no match between ways, ends and means, and it has been going downhill since then. It is now fighting this war simply because it has no idea what else to do, and does not have the courage to admit that it has failed.
And this week stories came out that indicated that things are heading in the wrong direction. The President is shaping the military in his own image, which means corrupt, gaudy and heading towards bankruptcy. What we are seeing is not just weakening the USA now, it will weaken the USA for years, maybe decades going forward. The only way to keep it from spiraling out of control is for drastic action now, which is to put much of the military in cold storage until a new administration takes power. More on that below.
Also, a quick note. I often say the “USA” instead of the “Trump Administration”, and that can make some people upset. They say, and I understand the emotion behind this, that what we are seeing is Trump in action, not the USA. However, as I think I have said before, blaming Trump and absolving the country seems to me at least to be dangerous and wrong. The American people chose Trump as their leader by solid majorities in the electoral college and a clear plurality in the popular vote. And they did this almost four years after he tried to block a free and fair election from being finalized on January 6, 2021. The American people have also voted for the Congress that approved his Cabinet members and is allowing him to do what he is doing.
This is the US government, chosen willingly by the American people, in action. Not acknowledging that is dodging the reality that the American people are ultimately responsible for this. So, I will keep referring to the action of the administration as that of the USA—because it is the truth and it is important to ultimately remember why this came about. America chose to do this to itself.
And that means the American people ultimately chose to make the USA not a serious country. Understanding that is maybe the key step to changing the situation.
The USA Is Engaged In A War With No Purpose
The USA is still engaged in a war (a blockade is an act of war) which has not the slightest purpose beyond the ego of the commander in chief. The war has already weakened the country and the longer it goes on, the weaker the country will become.
Over the last week, the pointlessness and lack of direction of the war was once again made brutally clear. First it was said that in Trump’s desire to get out of the war with something, he was willing to give up any nuclear demands and focus on reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Here was what the White House was leaking on the question to the Wall Street Journal just over a week ago.
Quote:Then two days ago he came out with this.
1. Trump thought opening the Strait of Hormuz was imminent. Iran had other plans.
President Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory in the Iran war if Tehran fully reopened the Strait of Hormuz—even privately floating to senior aides that he’s willing to walk away without a nuclear deal. But Iran’s recent demand for billions in reparations and a total U.S. troop withdrawal has thrown those plans into chaos. The recent hardline shift shows how Tehran is narrowing the White House’s options to wrap up the conflict ahead of the midterms.
Quote:Of course, Trump cannot even get the Strait open (in
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
The number one Goal is, and always will be, that Iran cannot have, in any way, shape, or form, a Nuclear Weapon. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
6.84k ReTruths 32.5k Likes
Aug 17, 2026,11:18 AM
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Actually, the interesting thing is that Iran is doing its best to provoke the USA into a shooting war, AGAIN, bc Iran knows that it can win a short, sharp war. That would demonstrate our military impotence in the ME and cause our Mideast allies petrodollar vassals to rethink their dependence on us and the USD. It would also once again remind Iranians that the USA is not their friend.
Meanwhile, other than volleys of Trump Truth Social threats, the USA refuses to actively reengage. Smart move.
Now it's a question of who will outlast who, financially and economically.
The USA seems to be applying financial pressure on Iran. The UAE broke financial services to Iran (UAE was Iran's unofficial conduit to western banks. Supposedly the IRGC and its officers and politicians stashed their wealth there). In addition the USA is attempting to help ships thru the Omani route.
Iran needs to maintain tight control of the Straits of Hormuz. That's really the only leverage they have. The collective West lasted thru the oil/diesel shortage far longer than anyone expected, except for Japan and S Korea. For USD financial markets, Japan's yen weakness can translate to weakness here. That's the nearest term risk the USD faces.
Politically, economically, and financially, Iran intends to last until our November election.
Kind of a horse race to see who gets to the finish line first.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Donald Trump Effectively Just Told Iran to Get a Nuclear Weapon
He may also have blurted out classified information about North Korea.
By Tom Nichols | August 20, 2026, 12:54 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/trump-north-korean-iran-nucl
ear-weapons/688339/
Anyone can get distracted now and then, and say things out loud he or she probably shouldn’t say. Perhaps an excited friend lets on about a surprise party, or a co-worker dishes up some unseemly office gossip. Or, if you’re the president of the United States, you might reveal some numbers about an adversary’s nuclear arsenal and then admit that those weapons, even a relatively small number of them, are pretty darn useful.
Donald Trump made this impromptu foray into nuclear-deterrence issues yesterday when he was inspecting the destruction he’s inflicted on the White House East Wing. A reporter asked whether he was again exchanging letters with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a reference to the president’s earlier epistolary bromance with Pyongyang’s dictator. “I can’t tell you that,” Trump responded. “But I get along with him. And you know what? The fact that I get along with him, that’s a good thing. Not a bad thing.”
It’s not always a “good thing” to “get along with” a murderous autocrat who runs a country that is functionally a prison camp, especially one with a nuclear arsenal. The size of that arsenal is a tightly held secret in Pyongyang, but it is not inconsequential: Experts working from open sources have made various guesses, usually in the range of roughly 60 thermonuclear weapons.
Trump, however, blurted out an exact tally. “He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons,” the president said. That’s a pretty specific number; the intelligence community almost never issues such precise figures, instead offering ranges of plausible guesses. Trump may be making it up out of nowhere, or perhaps talking about some subset of Pyongyang’s arsenal, as the arms-control expert Jeffrey Lewis suggested, or he’s garbling something he saw in a classified setting and didn’t understand. In the end, Lewis mused in a series of posts on social media, “Trump is trying to tell us a secret he heard, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what it means.”
Clearly, Trump has been getting briefed on developments about the North Korean nuclear inventory. And yet, he seems strangely unconcerned. The stockpile might be small, but it is in the hands of a dangerous regime. Even at its current estimated size, the Hermit Kingdom’s arsenal can kill tens of millions of people in Asia; soon enough, the North Koreans may be able to reach the United States with nuclear-armed long-range missiles.
The president, however, seemed more concerned with blaming other chief executives for the situation, and he assured everyone that all was well.
Quote:“Smart” and “dumb” need a bit of unpacking here, of course. When Trump says “smart,” he means me, and when he says “dumb” he means not me. What he seems to be implying is that although North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is very dangerous, he has no intention of messing with either the bombs or the regime and that future presidents would be fools to do otherwise.
Should have never allowed it to happen. They should have never allowed it. If I were president, I wouldn’t have allowed it. But he’s got ’em. I get along with him very well. I can't let Iran have a nuclear weapon. And I know Kim Jong Un very well, and he's gonna be fine. As long as we have a smart president, he’s going to be fine. If we have a dumb president, then he’s probably not gonna be so fine.
Trump never says how he would have stopped North Korea’s nuclear program, and despite his current equanimity about North Korea’s nukes, he has emphasized that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon, because … well, his reasoning on this double standard isn’t clear. Is it because the North Koreans—fighting alongside Russia in the middle of Europe, sharing missile technology with U.S. enemies, and running giant crypto scams—are som
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Quote:
Who Really Drives Global Terrorism? Internal US Govt Data Offers A Surprising Answer
Friday, Aug 21, 2026 - 08:25 PM
Authored by Larry Johnson via Sonar21.com
Every administration reaches for the same line. Iran, we are told, is the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism — a claim now central to the case for war. It carries the weight of an official designation: Iran has sat on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism since January 19, 1984, the longest-running designation currently on the books, alongside Cuba, North Korea, and Syria. The supporting figures get repeated as settled fact — more than a billion dollars a year in terror financing, and somewhere between 140,000 and 185,000 IRGC-Quds Force partner fighters spread across Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen.
The problem is that the government's own record doesn't back the headline. The place to test the claim is the data the State Department itself publishes — the statistical annex to Country Reports on Terrorism, and before it Patterns of Global Terrorism, the congressionally mandated series that has catalogued international terrorist incidents year by year since 1990. When you actually read those tables, a different picture emerges from the one sold on cable news.
Who commits the attacks
The annex doesn’t sort attacks by sect, but it doesn’t need to. The identity of the top perpetrator groups tells the story on its own. Year after year across 2004–2023, the most active and lethal groups are Sunni: the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda and its affiliates, al-Shabaab, the TTP. On the order of nine in ten attacks in the reporting trace back to Sunni extremist actors operating out of the Salafi-jihadist tradition. None of them answer to Tehran. Most regard Shia Muslims — Iran very much included — as heretics, and target them accordingly. ISIS has spent years at open war with Iran and its allies.
A separate French dataset, compiled by FONDAPOL over a longer 1979–April 2024 window, lands in the same place. The five deadliest Islamist groups over that period account for better than 80 percent of all victims of Islamist terrorism — and every one of the five is Sunni: the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, and al-Qaeda.
Where are the Iran-linked groups in all this? Largely absent from the top of the tables. Hezbollah and the Iran-aligned militias tend not to appear, in part because their operations are directed mainly at military forces rather than civilians, which places them outside the working definition of terrorism the reports use. The Houthis are the main Shia-linked group to surface in recent editions, and only as a small share of the total.
It is only in 2023 that three groups in Iran’s orbit — the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah — break into the top ten at all. They do so because of their attacks on Israel, and those attacks were aimed primarily at military targets. Before 2023, neither Hamas nor Hezbollah ranked among the groups responsible for the most attacks worldwide. That is a remarkable fact for two organizations routinely described as among the planet’s most prolific terrorists.
The Israeli numbers
Take the definition of terrorism that Benjamin Netanyahu himself uses — violence against civilians for political ends — and apply it to Israel’s own government data, drawn from the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s record of victims of Palestinian violence covering 2000 through April 2024. (That dataset predates and excludes the October 7, 2023 attack.)
Two things stand out. First, Palestinian attacks have trended downward since 2003. The peak sits in the 2000–2005 window — the Second Intifada. Across the full 24 years, 1,552 Israelis were killed and 5,595 wounded, and the violence is heavily concentrated in that early-2000s spike: roughly 76 percent of the deaths and 92 percent of the wounded fall within the Second Intifada years. Second, Hamas is not the terrorist engine the public imagination maNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Donald Trump has made the world go nuclear
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump Effectively Just Told Iran to Get a Nuclear Weapon
The president's behavior toward Iran and North Korea has incentivized other countries to develop nuclear weapons
By Heather Digby Parton | August 23, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)
https://www.salon.com/2026/08/23/donald-trump-has-made-the-world-go-nu
clear/
Donald Trump has always believed himself to be an expert at what he calls “nuclear,” due to the fact that his uncle, John Trump, was a physicist who taught at MIT. The president has made it clear on numerous occasions that his uncle’s expertise transferred to him due to the Trump family’s superior genes.
It’s too bad Dr. Trump died in 1985, because the president could use a refresher course on the subject. He certainly hasn’t learned anything new by virtue of the Oval Office.
We may never fully know what led Trump to start his war with Iran, which has been going on for nearly six months. Whether he was feeling his oats after the successful kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro or by Israel’s assurances that the Iranian regime was so weak it would crumble quickly under American bombardment, Trump decided to make the move on impulse without having a specific goal or strategy other than “winning.”
As the war has dragged on, Trump’s stated motives for the offensive have also changed. First, the administration claimed he wanted to liberate the Iranian people. Then it became regime change, then removing Iran’s capability to threaten its neighbors and finally, almost as an afterthought, the president said it was to prevent them from developing a nuclear weapon. Understandably, the administration was reluctant to use that rationale at first since Trump had already declared that along with Israel, he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program following joint airstrikes in 2025. But as the war has progressed into a standoff over the Strait of Hormuz, through which oil was flowing freely before it began, the issue of nuclear weapons is all they have left to explain the debacle.
Trump and administration officials have taken to declaring that the economic sacrifices Americans are making for his war are patriotic gestures to ensure that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon — a pledge that had already been successfully obtained through the 2015 Iran nuclear deal negotiated under President Barack Obama, which Trump tore up upon taking office the first time, and then supposedly obtained again through the force of several bunker-buster bombs in 2025. According to the polls, most Americans aren’t buying that claim.
At the same time, still sulking that U.S. allies didn’t rush to jump into his Iran quagmire, Trump has decided to pick up where he left off in 2020 with his alleged good pal Kim Jong Un and punish America’s longtime ally South Korea by canceling some military exercises after the country, in his words, “refus[ed] to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Anyone else would have seen how insensitive such a comment would be to a country that has been forced to stand by as the unhinged, totalitarian dictatorship to its north built up a nuclear arsenal aimed at them and their allies, all while the U.S. brayed about “denuclearization.”
In 2006 it was confirmed that North Korea had successfully conducted an underground nuclear test and was on its way to building a bomb. By the time Trump took office in 2017, according to estimates, the country had enough fissile material for 60 weapons and they were rapidly developing a ballistic missile program. At first Trump did his usual insult-and-threat routine, and he then hit upon the idea that he could personally talk Kim out of the program. The famous bromance began.
When Trump held his first summit with the North Korean leader, giving him the international prestige he had always wanted while getting nothing in return, the president was asked how long he thought it would take for North Korea to denuclearize. “Well
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Iran Unleashed
The dominant power in the Middle East from now on will not be the U.S. or Israel but Iran.
By Robert Kagan | August 23, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/08/iran-middle-east-pow
er/688374/
For years, Iran confronted a balance of power in the Middle East that tilted against it. The region was dominated by a hostile American superpower, a nuclear-armed and militarily superior Israel, and significant local actors—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates—that were strategically and economically aligned with the United States.
Today finds Iran in entirely new circumstances. It has gone head-to-head with the superpower and Israel, withstood a pounding from their most advanced weapons, and more than survived. As a result, Iran has, with American help, completely reconfigured the power structure of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. The dominant power in the region going forward will be Iran, not the U.S. or Israel. Neighboring countries are already making their adjustments to this new reality. More distant powers will too. For years, the world has been dealing with an Iran constrained. It will now discover what Iran unleashed looks like.
Iran doesn’t need a deal with the United States. The common assumption that a weak and impoverished Iran would eventually have to make some accommodation to American power, open the Strait of Hormuz, and set about tending to its badly damaged economy has proved mistaken. The Islamic Republic has rarely appeared weaker or more vulnerable than it has over the past two years. Last February, President Trump renewed his “maximum pressure” campaign of international sanctions, which severely damaged Iran’s already-weak economy and cut billions of dollars in state revenues. Israel and the United States then launched the 12-day war that June to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities. The war significantly damaged Iran’s program and revealed just how vulnerable the country was to Israeli and American strikes. Then, in February, the United States and Israel launched the most recent war with the killing of the regime’s supreme leader and the great majority of its senior officials, followed by more than five weeks of unremitting attacks on Iranian military capabilities.
Yet through all of this, the regime has survived and made no concessions. On the contrary, Iran exposed America’s Achilles’ heel: the vulnerability of Iran’s neighbors. A major turning point came in mid-March, when Israel attacked Iran’s South Pars gas field, and Iran retaliated against Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex, the world’s largest liquefied-natural-gas facility. The attack showed that although Iran obviously could not defeat the United States in an air war, Iranian missiles and drones could inflict enough damage on the oil-and-gas infrastructure of the Gulf to plunge the world into a prolonged economic crisis. The Gulf States understood this immediately, and so did Trump. He halted attacks on Iranian energy targets, ordered a reluctant Israel to do the same, and soon brought the larger campaign to a stop without extracting a single Iranian concession. Ever since, and despite many threats, Trump has not once ordered another strike against Iranian energy infrastructure.
This alone was enough to alter the balance of leverage between Iran and the United States. From April through last month, Trump repeatedly threatened to launch another massive attack against Iran. Each time, Iran threatened retaliation, Gulf States warned of the consequences, and Trump backed off. By his third or fourth bluff, Tehran had reason to conclude that the United States was no longer prepared to follow Iran up the ladder of escalation. Trump made this clear when he noted in mid-June that continuing the war would lead to “economic catastrophe,” possibly even a “depression,” and that he did not want to become President Herbert Hoover. Ever since, Trump has been trying, with notable desperation, to end the conflict.
The memorandum of understanding that the U.S. and Iran adopted in June reflected t
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Losing the Iran War: The Economic Front
The D in Bessent’s “D-Day” stands for Dud
By Paul Krugman | Aug 25, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/losing-the-iran-war-the-economic
Now it’s true that the U.S. Navy has mostly blocked Iranian oil exports. This means that Iran is losing its main source of export revenue. In 2025, that revenue amounted to about $45 billion.
That is a lot of money from Iran’s point of view — around 7 percent of the country’s 2025 GDP. It is, however, only about 0.2 percent of China’s GDP.
Why is China relevant? Well, because the Chinese are obviously enjoying great geopolitical benefits from Trump’s self-inflicted quagmire in Iran. And it would cost them very little, from their point of view, to keep us stuck in the quagmire by supplying the Iranian regime with enough money to finance purchases of essential imports.
Can’t the U.S. blockade Iranian imports too? No. Lucian Truscott has a very good article explaining how fundamentally impossible it would be for the US to close the many, many routes through which goods can get into Iran. https://luciantruscott.substack.com/p/trump-vs-the-smugglers-his-threa
t
In his remarks yesterday, Bessent made grandiose claims to the effect that we can isolate Iran by imposing sanctions on countries and companies that deal with the Iranian regime. But the Trump administration has already imposed tariffs and other sanctions on so many countries, for so many alleged purposes, and backtracked so many times, that its credibility is exhausted. Moreover, Iran can get much of what it needs from China. So do you really believe that a weakened U.S. can coerce China into helping it defeat Iran? And against China’s own strategic interests?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Latest Empty Threat Against Iran
The Trump administration gave its own explanation for why sanctions against Tehran won’t work.
By Vivian Salama | August 25, 2026, 11:46 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/08/treasury-bessent
-sanctions-iran-trump/688401/
No sooner had Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the latest tool for achieving what he said would be the “economic asphyxiation” of Iran than he revealed the reason he was reluctant to use it.
Secondary sanctions—penalties on countries, individuals, or entities that do business with Iran—are ready to go, Bessent announced to reporters in the Treasury’s ornate Cash Room yesterday. But he went out of his way not to name the chief offenders that help Tehran: China and Russia. So, Bessent was asked, why threaten rather than just do it, particularly after President Trump last week warned of economic warfare “on an unprecedented scale” if Iran doesn’t surrender to U.S. demands?
“Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?” Bessent responded, explaining that the administration is offering a bureaucratic grace period before the hammer falls. Secondary sanctions, he insisted, “are a very powerful tool.” Which is true. But the administration has repeatedly offered vivid explanations of what its powerful weapons can do, be they military or financial, and then declined to use them. Remember when Trump threatened to erase Iran as a civilization? The warnings may be intended to intimidate, but the lack of follow-through instead exposes just how narrow the administration’s options in Iran have become.
The possibilities for ending the war have been steadily closed off. The list of useful military targets is diminishing, and munitions stockpiles are perilously depleted, while the tools that were supposed to do what missiles could not—sanctions, blockades, financial pressure—have failed to produce the Iranian capitulation Washington promised. Iran has absorbed enormous damage, both military and economic, without surrendering its capacity to fight. And the countries that matter most to the financial-pressure campaign, including China and Russia, have shown little inclination to help Washington finish the job.
Soon after Trump took office last year, he announced that he was “restoring maximum pressure” on Iran, directing his administration to tighten sanctions and drive down Iranian oil exports. Eighteen months later, Bessent is promising what he describes as the “toughest sanctions in history.” Maximum pressure, it appears, has a sequel, much as Trump’s contention last June that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been obliterated was followed in February by a war to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
Trump, in a Truth Social post last week, hinted at what that sequel to maximum pressure would look like. “ANY country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences,” he wrote, before listing oil smuggling, financial swap lines, cash transfers, exchange houses, ship registries, and front companies that “all” need to stop “NOW.” It was the kind of warning designed to make the entire global financial system sit up straight. Then Bessent arrived at the Cash Room making equally stark threats, before pointing to a major reason why he shouldn’t follow through, assuming countries don’t voluntarily comply.
That leaves the administration in an uncomfortable position. The war has lasted far longer than Trump suggested it would, and its economic consequences are now a central issue in the midterm elections. Sanctions have inflicted economic pain on Iran for years without producing the result Washington wants. Yet China continues to buy Iranian oil, while Russia and other oil-producing countries stand to benefit from the drain of prolonged U.S. military action in Iran and from disruptions to energy exported from the Persian Gulf. “No one is above the reach of U.S. sanction
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