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                    "Washington has changed weapons. It has not changed its problem. On 24 August, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stood before reporters and announced what officials had spent ten days branding as an \u201ceconomic D-Day\u201d against Iran. He called it \u201cOperation Economic Outcast.\u201d He promised to \u201csever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone.\u201d The military campaign had stalled. The financial one now carries the weight instead.\nA threat without a timeline\nBessent\u2019s language left no room for ambiguity. He warned that any entity helping Iran launder money \u201cwill be removed from the US dollar system,\u201d adding that \u201cthe clock just started ticking.\u201d But he named no countries. He set no deadline. When a reporter pressed him on whether Chinese banks might be targeted, given that China buys roughly 90 percent of Iran\u2019s oil, he offered only a warning that \u201cno one is above the reach of US sanctions.\u201d He also admitted the obvious limit on his own leverage: \u201cWhy would I want to blow up the global financial system?\u201d\nThat single line does more to explain American strategy than the entire press conference around it. Washington needs a threat big enough to frighten Tehran\u2019s trading partners, but not so big that it destabilises the system the threat depends on. It is coercion with a built-in ceiling, and Iran\u2019s leadership has learned to read where that ceiling sits.\nThe human cost lands first\nOrdinary Iranians felt the pressure before any sanctions took effect. The rial collapsed to more than two million to the US dollar on the open market as Bessent\u2019s announcement approached, even though Iran\u2019s central bank still quotes an official rate near 1.5 million. Inflation now sits close to 90 percent, according to Iran\u2019s own Statistical Center. NPR spoke with a young Iranian woman who said most people now buy groceries on credit because they can no longer pay upfront. Sanctions rarely reach the men making decisions in Tehran. They reach households first, and they reach them fastest.\nREAD:\u00a0Qatar pledges support to ease hardships facing Iranian people\nGulf states are not rushing to applaud\nThe reaction from Gulf capitals has been telling. Several have spent billions of dollars building pipelines specifically designed to move oil around the Strait of Hormuz, insulating their exports from exactly the kind of chokepoint crisis Washington keeps generating.\n Yet when Bessent unveiled his new sanctions push, those same Gulf states offered no public comment. Silence from governments that usually rush to align themselves with Washington\u2019s Iran policy is itself a signal. It suggests quiet scepticism that another round of financial pressure will produce a different result than the last several rounds did.\nA currency losing its own argument\nThe deeper problem sits underneath the sanctions themselves. Threatening to cut a bank out of the dollar system only works if the dollar system remains something everyone wants to stay inside. JPMorgan\u2019s own research desk has tracked the currency\u2019s share of global reserves sliding to its lowest level in two decades, alongside a fifteen-year decline in foreign holdings of US Treasuries.\nIran\u2019s leadership does not need to read American newspapers to notice this trend. It only needs to observe how hesitant Washington\u2019s own allies have become about holding dollar assets. A superpower whose primary financial weapon is losing its universal appeal cannot wield that weapon with the confidence it once did.\nTehran is not blinking\nNone of this has moved Iran\u2019s military posture an inch. The Revolutionary Guard\u2019s wartime leadership, installed after Israeli and American strikes killed a string of senior commanders earlier this year, has pushed a harder line at every turn. The Guard\u2019s chief commander recently called deterrence \u201cthe only prudent and effective means\u201d of confronting what he described as ongoing \u201cenemy conspiracies.\u201d His spokesman went further, warning that Iran would deploy \u201csignificantly more destructive and advanced weapons\u201d in any future war. Financial pressure and military defiance are now running on separate tracks, and neither shows signs of bending toward the other.\nSame war, new currency\nOperation Economic Outcast is not a departure from the war. It is the war continuing by other means, aimed at Iran\u2019s bank accounts instead of its missile sites. But a financial weapon still needs credibility to work, and Washington\u2019s own fiscal position keeps eroding it. \nIran\u2019s economy will suffer under the new sanctions, as it has suffered under the old ones. Its ordinary citizens will absorb most of that suffering, as they always have. What will not change is Tehran\u2019s calculation that American pressure, however loudly announced, still stops short of forcing genuine capitulation. Six months of war taught Iran\u2019s leadership that lesson on the battlefield. Six days of sanctions announcements are unlikely to teach them anything different.\u00a0\nOPINION:\u00a0Washington\u2019s Iran war: Three tracks, one deadlock, and a revolution that never forgot 1953\nThe views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor."
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