US Imposes Stiff New Sanctions on Iran Amid Escalating Economic Pressures

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent outlined the new sanctions on Monday. The administration of United States President Donald Trump has announced new economic sanctions on Tehran, describing the measures as an “economic D-Day” as the US war on Iran approaches the six-month mark. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the sanctions on Monday, alongside a naval blockade of Iranian ports. Bessent said the sanctions target key sources of Iran’s revenue, including its oil and gas industry, and called on countries around the world to cut economic ties with Tehran.

The Treasury Department said the sanctions will target Iran’s aviation, digital assets, gold, technology and shipping sectors, as well as impose sanctions on 60 specific individuals and vessels. “The main point is that Iran seems to have much less room than it did in previous years to simply work around sanctions,” Peiman Salehi, a Tehran-based geopolitical analyst, told Al Jazeera. Bessent also said on Monday that the new sanctions expose Tehran’s trade partners to secondary penalties.

According to a Treasury Department release on Monday, the targets include ships based in or associated with countries including Singapore, China, and Hong Kong. “Today’s sanctions are mostly incremental, but are part of trying to intimidate remaining trading partners into cutting ties,” said Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security think tank.

Pressure on the Iranian oil market, both through existing sanctions as well as the current war, has tightened the rest of the globe’s oil supply and affected countries that buy Iranian oil. China, for example, is the primary destination for Iranian oil, buying roughly 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports. For US consumers, that has been most apparent at the petrol pump, with the average price for a gallon of petrol climbing to $4.09.