Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent used a White House briefing on April 15 to announce what he called the “financial equivalent” of a bombing campaign — a new escalation in the U.S. war on Iran.
The U.S. would apply secondary sanctions to any country or company doing business with Iran, he said. Banks holding Iranian money were targets, along with ships moving Iranian oil. Like the bombing, it is aimed at breaking resistance by making normal life impossible.
The bombing campaign and naval blockade began Feb. 28 as Operation Epic Fury. Bessent’s statement confirmed what the Treasury Department had already put in writing. On April 14, the Treasury Department sent letters to financial institutions in China, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, warning they could face secondary sanctions for handling Iranian business.
Secondary sanctions turn the dollar into a weapon. A U.S. sanction on an Iranian firm forbids U.S. companies from trading with it. A secondary sanction effectively forbids firms worldwide from trading with it — on pain of losing access to U.S. banks, insurers and clearing networks. Washington can impose this penalty because the dollar still dominates global trade and reserves.
The target is not just firms or banks. By cutting off trade, fuel, medicine and credit, the aim is to turn economic pressure into shortages and daily hardship that can force surrender.
This is not new. The template is Cuba. The U.S. imposed a trade blockade on the island in 1960 and froze Cuban assets in 1963. The extraterritorial reach developed over time. The Torricelli Act in 1992 barred foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies from trading with Cuba. The Helms-Burton Act in 1996 went further. It allowed U.S. nationals to sue foreign companies doing business with property nationalized by the Cuban revolution and denied visas to their executives and families. The designation has shifted across administrations, but the wider financial siege has remained.
The bank blockade followed. The Treasury fined BNP Paribas $8.9 billion in 2014 for clearing Cuban, Iranian and Sudanese transactions in dollars. Credit Suisse paid $536 million in 2009 for similar conduct. The lesson for foreign banks was clear: Refuse any Cuba-linked transaction, whatever the law technically allows, because the cost of getting it wrong is ruinous. Cuba has lived under the resulting financial siege for decades. The pressure falls not on abstract “markets,” but on daily life — shortages, blackouts and rationing used to force political surrender. Wire transfers fail. Correspondent banks pull out. Medical suppliers refuse shipments. The island rations fuel and power.
The Treasury extended the Cuba model to Iran after 2011 and tightened it in 2018. It extended it to Russia after 2022. The list of targets has grown. The instrument has not changed. What is new about the April 14 letter is scale and target. Earlier campaigns targeted economies Washington believed it could isolate. Bessent is threatening the banks of China — the world’s second-largest economy and the largest buyer of Iranian oil. He is threatening the United Arab Emirates, which hosts U.S. warships and an Air Force base at Al Dhafra. He is threatening Oman, which has mediated U.S.-Iran back-channel contacts for two decades.
The Treasury and the Pentagon are not separate instruments pursuing different goals. They are organs of the same imperialist state, acting for the same ruling class. When military force fails to impose submission quickly, finance capital turns to the dollar, the banks and the sanctions system. The carrier group and the dollar system are weapons in the same war. Bessent’s statement made that unity explicit.
Every new use of that weapon also exposes a deeper contradiction. Each time the Treasury weaponizes the dollar, it reinforces the lesson that holding dollars carries political risk. China, Russia, Iran and a growing number of states under pressure from Washington have spent the last decade building alternatives: yuan-denominated oil contracts, the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, bilateral swap lines and gold accumulation. Russian central bank reserves were frozen in 2022. Afghan central bank reserves were seized in 2021. The dollar’s share of global reserves has fallen steadily since 2000.
Threatening the banks of China over Iranian oil accelerates that process. Beijing will find ways around the sanctions. Washington can no longer impose its control over the world economy as easily as before, even with the dollar, sanctions and military force. The more openly U.S. imperialism weaponizes its financial dominance — not just against states, but against entire populations — the more it pushes other countries to reduce their dependence on it. The United Arab Emirates and Oman, caught between U.S. security ties and economic links to Asia, will try to protect their own interests. Repeated secondary-sanctions campaigns since the 1990s have pushed countries to reduce reliance on the dollar.
Bessent called it the financial equivalent of bombing. The aim is the same: force surrender by making normal life impossible.
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