ABNA24 - Two weeks ago, the US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed that Iran would have nothing left to bargain with in another two weeks and was shipping its last oil cargoes to China, its main oil buyer. He made that prediction on September 27, now, on October 13, the stated deadline has come and gone, but the predicted demise of Iran's economic capacity and the collapse of its economy have not materialized.
From maximum pressure to promise of collapse within weeks
Treasury Secretary has spent recent months repeatedly invoking the specter of intensified economic pressure on Iran, framing sanctions with goals that go well beyond curtailing Tehran's trade and foreign-currency earnings. On August 20, he declared that new American sanctions would bring down the Iranian government and called on other countries to join the policy. Days later, Washington unveiled a plan dubbed "Economic D-Day," whose stated aim was to sever Iran's financial ties to the world and cut Tehran off from its revenue sources.
On August 31, roughly two months ago, Bessent said Iran's economy could collapse within weeks or months. He claimed economic pressure would push Iran toward negotiations. Then, on September 27, the Treasury secretary sharpened that forecast into a firmer deadline, asserting that Tehran had only about 15 million barrels of oil in cargoes already in transit and would deliver its last oil shipments to China within two weeks; after that, he said, it would have nothing left to bargain with.
The remarks are part of a policy the Trump administration has branded "Operation Economic Outcast", a campaign to throttle oil sales, seal off financial channels, and force Iran's trading partners to cut ties with Tehran. The US has repeatedly tightened sanctions over the past decades, imposing significant costs on Iran's economy, yet that pressure has neither crippled the Iranian economy nor delivered Washington's political objectives.
After two weeks, has Bessent's prediction come true?
More than two weeks have now passed since Bessent's September 27 remarks, and while Iran's economy is indeed contending with the Trump administration's hostile pressures, the available evidence does not point to economic collapse.
Experts say one defining feature of Iran's economy in recent decades has been the emergence of mechanisms built to keep functioning under external constraints. Expanded domestic production in some sectors, partial import substitution, the creation of indirect trade routes, the use of intermediary networks to sell oil, and the cultivation of economic ties with non-Western partners are among the factors that have helped sustain Iranian economic activity under even the most punishing pressure.
The Spanish newspaper El País, in an August 21 report headlined "Washington Has Failed to Strangle Iran's Economy After Six Months," wrote that US trade and financial pressure has damaged Iran's economy but has not destroyed its productive backbone. The report cited Iran's long experience evading oil restrictions, its alternative trade networks, and its import-substitution policy as reasons its economy has kept running under sanctions.
Continued activity in the manufacturing and commercial sectors, the preservation of some links to foreign markets, and the steady flow of goods all indicate that Iran's economy has not stopped moving.
What do Western experts say?
A number of Western researchers and experts, too, have acknowledged that sanctions may inflict economic costs but do not produce the political change in behavior Washington is seeking.
Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, stressed at a Middle East Institute gathering in March 2024 that when American sanctions pile up unilaterally, the strategy's effectiveness erodes.
Charles W. Dunne, a former American diplomat and scholar at the Arab Center Washington DC, has said in media interviews that "from a Western or American standpoint, the pressure brought to bear on the Iranian government should have led to its collapse by now, but the system doesn't work that way." Pointing to all-out military war against Iran, the oil embargo, and the rial's depreciation, he stressed that none of these pressures has yet pushed Iran's system to the breaking point.
Suzanne Maloney, a leading American expert on Iran and vice president and director of the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, also told Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy: "The adaptability and resilience of Iran's economy over the past 47 years have been consistently underestimated."
Maloney recalled that even during Trump's first term, despite the maximum-pressure campaign and a severe squeeze on Iranian oil exports, Tehran managed to absorb the economic pressure. Citing Iran's 1951 nationalization of its oil industry, she noted that Britain's oil embargo likewise failed to force Iran to bow to London's demands.
The New York Times, in a recently published report, also noted the economic damage and the strain on ordinary Iranians, but wrote that Tehran has adapted to sanctions by building informal trade networks, selling oil to China, using a shadow fleet, reducing its dependence on imports, and conducting indirect exchanges.
Actually, Iran's current conditions suggest that its oil exports have sustained serious blow, but business activities have not halted and the predicting economic its collapse within two weeks has proven naive and a failure in practice.
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