US says it will target anyone doing business with Iran

**Pete Ross** (0:00)
This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Pete Ross, and in the early hours of Tuesday, the 25th of August, these are our main stories. The US is imposing more sanctions on Iran, this time targeting banks, businesses and countries that continue to trade with Tehran. Authorities in the US state of Nevada say they're beginning to contain the huge wildfire on the outskirts of Reno.
Also in this podcast...

**Mary Roloff** (0:31)
I think that if I was in a disaster zone and didn't have anything else to eat, that I would eat it, but I'm not sure I would pick it off the shelf over an Oreo.

**Pete Ross** (0:39)
Turning plastic into a cookie.
We begin with the war in Iran, which is now almost six months old. Despite its overwhelming firepower, the United States and its ally Israel have failed to bring the Iranian government down. In fact, in some ways, Tehran seems to have been strengthened. The Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the conflict, is now largely closed because of the threat to shipping from Iran. So the United States has decided on a new line of attack to go after countries, companies and individuals that have economic ties with Iran. The US Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, announced the move.

**Scott Bessent** (1:22)
It is no longer acceptable to operate in the gray spaces of this conflict. Countries cannot claim they are blind to enabling this activity.
Iran's enablers purchase, transport its petroleum. They facilitate the flow of its finances through exchange houses and free trade zones. They welcome Iran's flights and maintain registries on its behalf. They turn a blind eye to seaborne fuel transfers and overland transits. They condone illicit use of their banks, all the while concealing the extent of their complicity.

**Pete Ross** (2:00)
But Mr. Bessent didn't have a long list of those to be sanctioned. And there was only limited targeting of China, the country that buys the majority of Iranian oil.
So who is on the US sanctions list? Our State Department correspondent is Tom Bateman.

**Tom Bateman** (2:16)
We did get some specific and concrete measures that the US Treasury has announced about sanctions on individuals, on companies and entities that they say support Iran in terms of its ability to export oil, in terms of getting money for that back into Iran. Not just about that, but also they say about international support for its ballistic missile program and also for cyber attacks, they say the Iranians are carrying out. So we saw a lot of sanctions detailed around all of that.
But I would say, given the way that this announcement had been trailed, it was being described as economic D-Day on Iran, the biggest financial operation to isolate a country in history. We didn't see that. We didn't see a major announcement, for example, against a very large Chinese bank. The Americans accuse the Chinese of helping facilitate Iran sell its oil and doing that through major financial institutions. So even though there was this very sort of belligerent language when it came to the nature of this sanctions operation from the Trump administration, the actual actions didn't live up to what had been threatened.

**Pete Ross** (3:27)
Yeah, if the US really means business about this, it's going to have to go after China, is it not? I mean, we know that oil is Iran's largest export and China buys the vast majority of it. Do we have any indication as to, given the way, as you say, this was trailed, why they haven't gone after China?

**Tom Bateman** (3:43)
Scott Bessent answered that when he was pressed on it by saying that he wasn't quite ready to blow up the global economy, as he put it. And I think that is a nod to the risks involved for Washington if they go down the road of really trying to cut off from the US dollar system major Chinese financial institutions in terms of their ability to continue selling into international markets because the Chinese will retaliate. And one of the ways that the Chinese can retaliate, we've dabbled with this before, is to cut off the export of critical minerals to the United States, that China has a huge monopoly over. And that would have huge consequences for America. It needs those things for batteries, for powering armaments and munitions, you know, its ability to wage warfare.

**Pete Ross** (4:28)
And if Washington gets the reaction that it wants, do you think that's going to make much of a difference? Is any of this going to bring Iran back to the table for negotiations?

**Tom Bateman** (4:36)
Certainly it adds more economic pressure, it makes more problems for the government in Tehran, for the Iranian regime.