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The United States has used its control of the world's banking system to cut Iran off from trade, and presses other countries to do the same. Iran has kept selling oil, mostly to China, through a fleet of unmarked tankers and small banks. In August 2026 Washington announced what it called the toughest sanctions in history, aimed at the countries and companies that still deal with Iran.
The wider confrontation, its history and each side's full account: Iran in regional and international confrontation.
The campaign announced on 24 August has reached a bank in the Emirates and, in September, Iran's airlines. Its harshest measures were held back. Iran has warned its neighbours against joining in, and its president has admitted that the sanctions cause serious problems.
Sanctions are meant to change Iran's conduct without war. After fifteen years there is war as well, and the argument is over what they achieve and whom they hit. There is a second dispute inside the first: whether the United States may punish third countries for trade that their own laws allow. China, India, Turkey and the Gulf states have never accepted that it may.
Iran funds its missiles, its militias and its nuclear work with oil money. Cutting that money is the alternative to bombing, and it works: it brought Iran to the table in 2015 and again in 2026. Those who help Iran evade the measures are financing the threat, and will be treated accordingly.
The sanctions are economic warfare against ninety million people. They block medicine and aircraft parts, destroy the savings of ordinary families, and leave the state's security organs untouched. They are unlawful, imposed by one country on the world, and restored even when Iran kept its agreements. Iran has lived under them for a generation and has learned to trade around them.
Washington's leaves out that sanctions eased in June 2026 were restored within weeks whatever Iran did; that they have enriched the very Guard networks that run the smuggling; and the sick and the poor who pay first.
Tehran's leaves out how much of the damage comes from its own mismanagement and corruption, and that the money that does come in goes to the Guard and its allies abroad before it goes to Iranians.
The buyers' leaves out the discount: Iran's isolation lets them buy its oil cheap.
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Whom they buy oil from is their own business. No UN resolution obliges them to follow American law, and the dollar's reach is being used as a weapon against their economies as much as against Iran's. They will trade in other currencies if they must.