Democracy Dies with Dictatorship
NY Times
Aug 24, 2026
Trump Administration Live Updates: U.S. to Target Iran’s Economy
What We’re Covering Today
Middle East: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is expected to outline on Monday new measures to isolate Iran’s economy, which is already in free fall because of the war and U.S. sanctions pressure. Esmail Baghaei, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, said the Trump administration was “repeating methods that have proven unsuccessful” as it seeks to pressure Tehran to negotiate an end to the war. Read more ›
South Korea: The United States canceled a joint amphibious landing exercise with South Korean forces that had been set for next month, citing resource constraints driven by the war in Iran, the South Korean military announced Monday. The U.S. military in Korea did not immediately comment on the announcement. Read more ›
Middle East
Aug. 24, 2026, 4:59 a.m. ET4 hours ago
Reporting from Washington
The Trump administration is set to announce on Monday what it is describing as its most comprehensive assault to date on Iran’s economy, unveiling a package of measures that are intended to isolate Iran from the rest of the world.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is expected to announce the plan at a news conference on Monday afternoon.
The escalation of sanctions pressure comes as negotiations to end the military conflict between the United States and Iran continue to sputter.
The United States has ramped up pressure on Iran’s economy this year through its Operation Economic Fury initiative. But Mr. Bessent, along with President Trump, has signaled that the new initiative will include greater coordination between the United States and its allies to cripple Iran’s economy.
“At dawn begins an economic D-Day — the single greatest financial offensive ever marshaled against an adversary,” Mr. Bessent wrote in a social media post on Sunday evening. “The President has created the conditions to leverage every agency, every authority and action many assumed we would never summon.”
He added, “Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains the tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone.”
The Treasury secretary said last week that countries that continued to do business with Iran, including money transfers and oil purchases, would face the “full might and force” of the U.S. government. Mr. Trump has also promised an “economic D-Day” against Iran, a “crushing” operation that he said would “cripple” the country.
The United States could look to impose secondary sanctions on countries that continue to do business with Iran, including purchasing its oil. However, it is not clear how the Trump administration plans to deal with China, which is the world’s largest buyer of Iranian oil.
The Treasury Department has imposed sanctions on independent Chinese refineries that buy Iranian oil, but it has refrained from imposing large-scale sanctions on Chinese financial institutions that facilitate such transactions.
Any new economic measures that implicate China could complicate Mr. Trump’s upcoming meeting with the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, in Washington next month.
Mr. Bessent suggested that China was aligned with the United States when it came to finding a resolution to the war in Iran and reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
“Many conversations are best to have in private,” Mr. Bessent told CNBC last week. “And we are confident that everyone wants the strait reopened and for energy prices to come back down.”
Iran’s economy has been in free-fall this year because of the war and sanctions pressure.
On Saturday, Iran’s new security chief, Mohsen Rezaei, vowed to strike the interests of oil-rich neighbors if they joined U.S. efforts to further isolate Iran. He warned that Tehran would seek to prevent “even a single drop of oil” from leaving the region.
Aug. 24, 2026, 6:15 a.m. ET3 hours ago
Oil prices retreated on Monday ahead of an expected announcement of new measures by the United States aimed at further isolating Iran economically.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he will detail what President Trump has called an “economic D-Day” for Iran on Monday afternoon in Washington. In an opinion essay in The Financial Times, Mr. Bessent said the six-month war with Iran was “entering the endgame.”
Without specifying what measures might be taken, Mr. Bessent took aim at Iran’s “enablers purchase and transport its petroleum,” seemingly pointing the finger at China, which has been the main buyer of Iranian crude in recent years. Iran has warned it would strike the interests of neighboring states if they joined the U.S. efforts.
Oil prices slide
The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, fell 1.8 percent to about $93 a barrel. The cost of crude has risen nearly 30 percent since the start of the war.
West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, slipped 2.3 percent to around $85 a barrel.
Shipping disruption in Middle East grinds on
Investors and analysts are focused on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman that is a vital trading route for oil and natural gas. Over the past month, the Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen have restricted traffic in the Bab al-Mandab Strait at the southern end of the Red Sea, which Saudi Arabia has used as an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz.
Over the weekend, 30 ships navigated the Strait of Hormuz and 83 transited the Bab al-Mandab Strait, according to Kpler, the maritime data firm. The number of passages through both straits were near recent five-day averages. Before the war, an average of about 130 ships transited the Strait of Hormuz daily.
A tanker was struck in the Red Sea, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations agency said on Monday. The vessel was west of Yanbu, Saudi Arabia, and no one was reported injured, the agency said. Since the start of the war, 68 ships have been attacked in the Middle East, according to the International Maritime Organization.
Gasoline prices edge higher
Gas prices rose slightly on Monday to a national average of $4.10 a gallon, according to the AAA motor club. The increase has raised the cost for drivers by 38 percent since the war began.
Gas prices don’t move in lock step with crude, usually trailing increases or drops by a few days.
The average price of diesel also ticked higher to $5.61 on Monday, up 49 percent since the start of the war.
Aug. 24, 2026, 6:06 a.m. ET3 hours ago
Sanam Mahoozi and Aaron Boxerman
Iranian officials struck a defiant tone in response to the U.S. threats to escalate already punishing economic sanctions. Esmail Baghaei, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, told reporters on Monday that the Trump administration was merely “repeating methods that have proven unsuccessful” in the past.
Mohsen Rezaei, a senior Iranian official, made a more explicit threat against American allies in the Persian Gulf over the weekend. If the U.S.-led economic campaign continued, “not a single drop of oil will be exported” in the Persian Gulf, Rezaei said on social media. “Iran will regard any country’s participation in or support for America’s economic war against the Iranian people as an act of war.”
Aug. 20, 2026, 10:09 a.m. ETAug. 20, 2026
The Trump administration has threatened “tremendous economic consequences” on any country that does business with Iran, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was expected to unveil a new package of sanctions on Monday aimed at isolating Tehran further from the global economy.
President Trump first announced the threat in a vaguely worded social media post on Wednesday. Mr. Bessent said last week that countries that continue to do business with Iran would face the “full might and force” of the U.S. government. Both men have described the measures as an “economic D-Day” for Iran.
The president aims to put pressure on Iran’s leadership to negotiate an end to the war, though he has occasionally backed down from such threats. Iran, whose economy is already in free fall, has pledged to fight back: Its security chief warned over the weekend that Tehran would strike the interests of its oil-rich neighbors if they joined U.S. efforts to isolate the country further.
Here are some of the countries that could be most affected by new Trump administration measures:
China
China is Iran’s largest trading partner and the primary consumer of its oil, according to recent analysis by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a group founded by Congress to examine America’s bilateral ties to China.
For years, China has been practically alone in its willingness to defy Western sanctions on Iranian oil, buying up to as much as 90 percent of Tehran’s oil exports. In recent months, however, Iran’s ability to ship oil by sea has been all but cut off by a U.S. naval blockade.
Last year, China estimated its bilateral trade with Iran to be worth nearly $10 billion, a figure that doesn’t include oil.
But from a Chinese perspective, that is a drop in the ocean compared to the size of its overall economy, said William Figueroa, an expert in Chinese-Iranian relations at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. “It wouldn’t be catastrophic for China if it was to have its trade or its ability to import Iranian oil impacted,” he said.
The biggest advantage Beijing draws from that trade relationship is geopolitical, said Andrea Ghiselli, a political scientist who specializes in China at the University of Exeter in England. Beijing has some interest in preserving the Iranian regime as a thorn in the side of the United States, he said.
Dr. Ghiselli described the share of oil that China imports from Iran as marginal, and said that “it can easily be swapped out” for other sources on the global market.
In response to a question on Thursday about the possible effects of coercive U.S. economic measures, the Chinese foreign ministry’s spokesman, Lin Jian, called for all parties to resolve their differences through diplomatic channels.
“Sanctions and pressure will not help solve the problem,” he said.
India
Iran was once India’s most important energy supplier. But U.S. sanctions have pushed New Delhi to reduce ties, and the value of trade between the two countries has shrunk dramatically in recent years, according to official data from the Indian embassy in Iran.
The data estimates that in the 2025-26 financial year, total bilateral trade was $1.63 billion, down sharply from over $17 billion in 2018-19.
In 2019, India stopped buying Iranian oil altogether, under pressure from Mr. Trump. In the last financial year, Indian officials said the country mainly imported apples, pistachios, dates and kiwis from Iran.
But in April, after the U.S. Treasury issued a 60-day waiver authorizing countries like India to purchase Iranian oil to alleviate war-driven supply disruptions and soaring energy prices, crude from Iran officially returned to India for the first time in seven years.
United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Turkey and Pakistan
These four Iranian trading partners also appear vulnerable to Mr. Trump’s threat, said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, chief executive of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, a London-based think tank focused on Iran’s economy.
On Wednesday, the United Arab Emirates appeared to pre-empt the president’s comments by announcing a halt to all trade and financial transactions with Iran. According to data from the World Trade Organization, Iranian-Emirati trade was worth roughly $28 billion in 2024. The Emirati decision could affect the ability of Iranian importers to pay for goods, as a lot of those financial services are provided through the U.A.E., Mr. Batmanghelidj said.
Pakistan and Turkey have so far been relatively shielded from U.S. economic measures against Tehran, even as they have continued significant overland trade with Iran, Mr. Batmanghelidj said.
In 2022, the latest year for which World Trade Organization data was available, Iran imported more than $11 billion worth of goods from Turkey, its third largest source of imports that year.
For both Pakistan and Turkey, “it is politically and geopolitically very important that both these countries maintain a good relationship with Iran,” said Mr. Batmanghelidj. “And I think this is where the Trump administration is really going to struggle.”
Burcu Ozcelik, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute research group in London, said Iraq was also vulnerable to U.S. economic pressure because of its continued trade with Iran. American sanctions have already targeted Iranian-linked groups in Iraq.
But Dr. Ozcelik said that broader sanctions on Iran’s trading partners would be far more complicated to impose, and that implementing them “will be slow, uneven and difficult to monitor.” It was far from clear, she added, that “greater pressure would produce the political behavior Trump is seeking.”
Keith Bradsher and Siyi Zhao contributed research.
Corrected on
Aug. 21, 2026
:
An earlier version of this article incorrectly implied that India had not purchased Iranian oil since 2019. Iranian crude officially returned to the country in April.
More Administration News
Aug. 24, 2026, 5:48 a.m. ET3 hours ago
The U.S. military said it had attacked a boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Sunday, killing two people it described as “narco-terrorists.” It is the latest strike in the Trump administration’s campaign to target vessels it says are smuggling drugs. The strike, announced by the U.S. Southern Command, appears to be the first such attack since June.
A broad range of legal specialists have said that the boat strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians, including suspected criminals, who do not pose an imminent threat.
Aug. 24, 2026, 5:19 a.m. ET4 hours ago
Reporting from Seoul
The United States has canceled a joint amphibious landing exercise with South Korean forces that was set for next month, citing resource constraints driven by the war in Iran, the South Korean military announced Monday.
The U.S. Marine Corps had notified its South Korean counterpart in June that Middle East operational demands would prevent the deployment of forces for the biennial exercise known as Ssangyong, or “Twin Dragons,” the South Korean Marine Corps said on Monday. The U.S. military in Korea did not immediately comment on the announcement.
The move marked the second joint military drill with South Korea to be canceled or downsized during President Trump’s second term. The decision has intensified doubts over Washington’s commitment to maintaining a credible deterrent on the Korean Peninsula and its capacity to manage concurrent global conflicts, as U.S. weapons stockpiles have fallen to troubling levels.
Ssangyong is one of the highest-profile joint exercises that the allies have conducted for decades. In a typical iteration, more than 10,000 Marines from both countries storm a sandy beach on the southeastern coast of South Korea, supported by columns of amphibious vehicles and fleets of military aircraft. North Korea has routinely condemned the drill as a rehearsal for invasion.
While Ssangyong was previously shelved during Mr. Trump’s first term — when he dismissed major exercises as “provocative” and too expensive amid his personal diplomacy with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — it was revived in 2023.
However, Mr. Trump recently renewed his criticism of the drills, labeling them “insulting” to Mr. Kim. Earlier this month, he abruptly ordered the Pentagon to curtail the Ulchi Freedom Shield, shortening the 11-day annual exercise to just five days.
“The U.S. and South Korean Marine Corps are continuing close consultations regarding the future resumption” of Ssangyong, Han Seung-jeon, a South Korean Marine Corps spokesman, said on Monday.
Beyond financial concerns, Mr. Trump has questioned why his country should support joint military drills when South Korea has declined to participate in the conflict with Iran. The war has significantly strained U.S. military resources, depleting critical munitions stockpiles and forcing a realignment of assets from Asia to the Middle East.
Mr. Trump also appears eager to pivot from the Middle East conflict toward renewed diplomatic engagement with Mr. Kim, with whom he once said he “fell in love.” While halting drills successfully incentivized Mr. Kim to negotiate during Mr. Trump’s first term, North Korea dismissed this month’s scaling down of Ulchi Freedom Shield as “unworthy of comment.”