Iran sanctions hit patients, not Tehran
A US threat to punish any country trading with Iran falls hardest on Iranian patients and Gulf-region workers, as Britain quietly signs on.
Iranian patients short of medicine, Turkish households facing a gas squeeze and Pakistani teenagers smuggling fuel are paying for Washington’s new sanctions threat against Iran’s trade partners.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unveiled the campaign, called Operation Economic Outcast, on Monday, threatening severe sanctions against any country or company maintaining economic ties with Tehran. He called it ‘the single greatest financial offensive’ in history, comparing his sanctions campaign on Iran’s trade partners to the D-Day landings.
A war that didn’t end as planned: US sanctions Iran trade partners The threat lands six months into a war that has not gone to plan for Washington. The US-Israeli campaign that opened on 28 February killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, a killing confirmed at the time by Iranian state television, but the Iranian state did not collapse and Tehran has not conceded on uranium enrichment. At least 2,100 civilians have been killed by US-Israeli strikes since, according to figures from Iran’s health ministry, including 168 children the ministry says died when the Shajarat al-Tayyiba primary school was bombed on the war’s first day.
Iran answered by closing the Strait of Hormuz and attacking ships that defied the closure; Trump responded with a counter-blockade on Iranian oil exports. The impasse has already cut Iran’s oil exports from around 1.4m barrels a day before the war to under 300,000 by May, according to tanker-tracking data compiled by the commodities analytics firm Kpler. This week’s sanctions are not filling a gap so much as adding a fresh layer to an economy already under siege.
A British hand on the lever
The campaign is not only American. Within a day of Bessent’s announcement, UK Chancellor John Healey issued his own statement welcoming it, saying Britain ‘supports US work to secure a diplomatic solution and welcome[s] efforts to increase pressure, including through Operation Economic Outcast.’ Healey also confirmed the Starmer government has imposed more than 240 sanctions on Iran since taking office, a tally that has drawn little attention in Westminster reporting even as it makes Britain a co-author, not a bystander, of the pressure now falling on Iranian patients and Pakistani smugglers alike.
Who defies the sanctions on Iran’s trade partners
China, which the US Energy Information Administration estimates buys around 80% of Iran’s shipped oil, has already said it will not comply. Its Washington embassy called the measures ‘illegal unilateral’ steps that ‘do not help resolve the problem’ and vowed to safeguard its own interests. Asked whether Beijing would be targeted, Bessent said ‘no one is above the reach of US sanctions’, though Washington backed off an economic confrontation with China over Iran only last year, according to the International Crisis Group’s Ali Vaez.
Turkey has even less room to comply. Iran supplies around 13% of Turkish gas imports, according to Turkish energy ministry data, and analysts say Recep Tayyip Erdoğan cannot risk a domestic energy crisis by cutting ties, particularly with elections approaching. Pakistan faces the opposite pull: its army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, and interior minister Mohsin Naqvi flew to Tehran this week to discuss reopening Hormuz, even as fuel smuggling across the 900km Pakistan-Iran border, much of it carried out by teenagers on foot or motorbike, has increased since the war began.
Tehran, for its part, says it will not be moved. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called the new sanctions ‘desperate’, arguing that blockades and military strikes had already failed. ‘We have never been afraid,’ he said. Economy Minister Ali Madanizadeh predicted the campaign would bring Washington ‘another defeat’, while the armed forces’ chief of staff, Maj Gen Ali Abdollahi, warned that retaliation could come by land, sea, air or cyberattack.
A damp squib with a human cost
The government’s case is a security one as much as a punitive one. Iran still holds the capacity to close a strait carrying a fifth of the world’s oil, and the House of Commons Library has catalogued Iranian state threat activity on British soil; ministers can point to a genuine national-security rationale, not just a moral one. But independent economists are unconvinced the new measures will do much beyond adding to the human cost. Oxford Economics has called the likely revenue impact ‘somewhat of a damp squib’, and Vaez notes Iran is already sanctioned at almost every level, meaning enforcement, not new designations, is the real question. Former US State Department adviser Aya Ibrahim put it more starkly: sanctions of this kind ‘incentivise countries to find ways around them’ and ‘deny people necessities to stay alive.’
Iranian reporting, sourced mainly to diaspora outlets close to Western governments and worth reading with that caveat, points to shortages in roughly 85 essential medicines as hard currency dries up. What is not in dispute is the shape of this war’s fourth phase: bombs gave way to a blockade, and the blockade has now given way to a sanctions list reaching into pharmacies in Tehran and fuel queues on the Pakistani border, while the men who signed it compare their own work to Normandy.
