U.S. Economic D-Day Targets More Than Just Iranian Oil

Frustrated on the military front by its war with Iran, the United States has announced an “Economic D-Day,” threatening to punish any country or entity that does business with Tehran in key industries.The U.S.Treasury Department vowed to target Iran’s gold, digital assets and aviation industries, among others, aiming to throttle the few options Iran has left for global trade.

Iran uses these sectors “to prop up its failing economy” and to “continue its campaign of destabilization and terrorism in the region and around the world,” the Treasury Department said in a statement on Monday.Iranian officials dismissed the Trump administration’s pronouncement as bluster.Iran’s speaker of Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said in a statement on social media on Monday that Iran’s trading partners were not taking the new threats seriously.The sweeping Treasury announcement left many questions, including how far the United States was willing to go to punish major Iranian trading partners, like China.

And Iran has long found ways to circumvent such measures, including by trading with Russia and its neighbors in the region.But though the declaration served as a warning to certain industries, it did not immediately blacklist all individuals and companies involved, providing time for negotiations.The threat of a more aggressive economic tack via new U.S.

sanctions, however, came less than a week after the United Arab Emirates, one of Iran’s top trading partners, announced plans to halt all trade and financial transactions with the country.Mahdi Ghodsi, an economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, said the new generalized sanctions proposed by the United States stood to hit ordinary Iranians the hardest.As in war, Mr.

Ghodsi said, “civilians are the casualties” in economic conflict.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we ver...