'Economic D-Day' sanctions against Iran will be 'single greatest financial offensive ever' Bessent says

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the sanctions the United States plans to impose on Iran will constitute the largest financial measures ever directed at an adversary. He made the statement hours before the measures were scheduled for announcement on Monday.

The planned sanctions follow remarks Bessent gave on CNBC on Friday, in which he stated that the United States would apply the toughest sanctions in history. President Trump separately warned that any country providing support to Iran would face economic consequences of its own.

Bessent posted on social media Sunday night that President Trump had dismantled Iran’s military capabilities, destroyed nearly 100 percent of its military factories, and buried its nuclear program. He added that the United States was entering the endgame and that an economic D-Day, described as the single greatest financial offensive ever marshaled against an adversary, was beginning at dawn.

Iranian officials have stated that the sanctions would produce crushing, punishing, and devastating consequences and that support for the measures by other nations would be viewed as an act of war. In his Sunday post, Bessent addressed the Iranian warning by stating that the Islamic Republic had subsisted by dressing extortion as security guarantees and had drawn strength from a calculation that Iranian retaliation was certain while American enforcement was negotiable. He wrote that under President Trump that era was over and that those who feared defying Tehran should not discount the cost of testing Washington.

Bessent also published a column in the Financial Times on Sunday that compared the planned sanctions to the June 6, 1944, Normandy landings. He noted that as Roosevelt and Churchill weighed the campaign that would lead to those landings, they asked what could be done to bring the greatest pressure to bear on the enemy, a question drawn from the 1943 Tehran Conference. He stated that history had returned that question to Tehran and that the moment had arrived to answer it with the full weight of American resolve.

Bessent wrote that President Trump was ending a threat that previous administrations had resigned themselves to managing. He said that for decades the political class had accepted an endless cycle of provocation instead of advancing American interests and that no further generation should face the threat posed by those devoted to opposing the United States and pursuing nuclear capabilities. He added that total financial isolation could remove the need for American force while enlarging the sphere of freedom for allies.

The sanctions announcement is expected to detail specific financial restrictions on Iranian entities and on third parties that continue transactions with them. Bessent’s statements on social media and in the Financial Times column constitute the primary public explanation of the administration’s approach ahead of the formal release of the measures.