U.S. pressures world to cut Iranian business ties

With a blazer, T-shirt, and mug en route, eventually, I promise, Nancy Cordes, North Lawn of the White House. Thank you very much. I want to bring in Matt Kroenig, otherwise known as Matthew, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He served the Department of Defense and intelligence community under presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and during President Trump's first term. I want to play for you and our audience sound from Treasury Secretary Bessent on this particular matter and how it's important from the White House perspective for other nations to join this economic fight. Please listen. It is time for our allies and the rest of the world to make a decision, and we are going to squash the economy of this murderous regime, which that will curtail their ability to project power through their proxies. It is a one-two punch. We have the blockade, and we are going to have the toughest sanctions in history. And I will tell you, this will work. That's bullish, if it all does come to pass. I saw reports today that China is not on board. Maybe others won't be. Is this going to work? I think it will work to increase the economic pressure on Iran. I don't know that it's going to work to resolve the conflict and get the kind of deal President Trump wants. On working to put pressure on Iran, I think something important for your viewers to understand is when we talk about sanctioning Iran, we're not really sanctioning Iran. We're threatening to sanction the rest of the world. We essentially say to China-- That does business with Iran. That's right. So China, India, Turkey, if you do business with Iran, we'll sanction you. So you essentially force the rest of the world to decide, would we rather buy cheap Iranian oil and gas, or would we rather have access to the US dollar, US markets? And that puts countries in a difficult dilemma, and at least some of them, I think, will decide, we can't afford to lose access to the US market. We are going to start, at least, curtailing our purchases of Iranian oil. The president was kind of specific about things that the United States intends to target, and I want to summarize them for my audience-- oil smuggling, currency swap lines, cash transfers, exchange houses, ship registries, front companies. Some of this, Matthew, sounds completely off the books. How do we get to it? How do we sanction something that is quite obviously in the black market? Yeah, well, it's always a cat-and-mouse game with sanctions because you threaten to sanction an entity that's doing business with Iran, and often what they'll do is set up shop under another name. And so you've got a constant--

They play dodgeball with them. They play dodgeball. And so the US Treasury has to constantly track them down and sanction these new entities. And some of them aren't even licensed or named. They're completely off the books, utterly black market.

Yeah, that's right. And so viewers might be thinking, well, why haven't we been doing this all along? But as you remember a few weeks ago, as part of the strategy, we were essentially allowing Iran to sell oil as part of this MOU. We thought we had a deal. Now that we realize that hasn't worked, we're saying, OK, now it's time to turn up the pressure again. So it's been said and I've read other places, Matthew, that if this is the new policy, we all better wait a while because it will take a long time to implement and a long time for it to create the pincer effect on the Iran economy and maybe even a longer time after that for it to have any political ramifications for the regime. That's exactly right, and I think the president still wants a deal. That's what he's said. But I think they're realizing that the conditions aren't ripe right now. The Iranian regime is not willing to make the kind of deal that we would accept, and so they're setting the table with some more pressure. Let that set in. And the hope is weeks, maybe months from now, the Iranian regime says, OK, this is getting difficult. Let's go back to the negotiating table and try something different. Prod them back to the table. Matthew Kroenig, I appreciate it very much. Thank you.

Thank you