CAIRO/WASHINGTON, Aug 22 — The United States (US) and Iran exchanged defiant messages ahead of Monday's scheduled announcement of new US economic sanctions that could impact the Islamic Republic and Tehran's most important trading partners, including China.
As the war neared six months old, the two sides were not exchanging fire but also not pursuing peace talks. All the while, oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz have virtually halted as Tehran clings to its leverage by threatening to strike any unauthorised oil tankers that attempt to transit the narrow waterway.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will hold a press conference at 2pm EDT (1800 GMT) on Monday, promising to reveal "the toughest sanctions in history" on Iran while also urging China to cooperate with Washington.
According to 2025 data from analytics firm Kpler, China buys more than 80 per cent of Iran's shipped oil. Beijing has urged diplomacy.
On Saturday, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said that the imminent US announcement of new economic sanctions on Iran was an "assertion of extraterritorial sovereignty over every independent member state of the United Nations."
"Such secondary sanctions find no foundation in international law," he said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
On Friday, US President Donald Trump, who has warned of economic consequences against any country that provides "any type of lifeline to Iran," said that Washington was observing "what happens" in the conflict.
"They would love to make a deal, but they are not ready to make the right deal, in my opinion," he said of Iran.
Hormuz traffic halted
While the US has effectively blockaded Iranian vessels in their ports, the Strait of Hormuz remained bottled up with thousands of seafarers stranded on hundreds of vessels. Ship-tracking data indicated that only four commodity ships sailed along the strait on Thursday, none of them large crude carriers or liquefied natural gas tankers.
US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the US military helped move a seven-day average of eight million barrels a day of oil through the Strait. That is down from more than 20 million per day before the war, or about one of every five barrels consumed worldwide.
US attacks have severely diminished Iran's economy and devastated its navy and air force, but Tehran maintains enough missile and drone capability to impede oil tanker traffic and attack regional rivals.
Meanwhile, Trump has yet to achieve objectives he set at the start of the war, such as dismantling Iran's nuclear programme — the state of which remains uncertain given that United Nations inspectors have been shut out since 2025 — and creating conditions for Iranians to overthrow their clerical rulers.
Thousands have been killed, including 168 Iranian school children on the first day of the war. The US has reported more than 750 military personnel wounded and 18 killed.
Iranian economy damaged
On Friday, Iran's Armed Forces Chief Of Staff Major General Ali Abdollahi promised that Tehran would respond to enemy threats militarily with "crushing, punishing, and devastating responses.”
Nonetheless, President Masoud Pezeshkian called for a diplomatic solution.
"It would be better to end the war today, when we are powerful and have dignity, and the whole world acknowledges our victory and emphasises that America, contrary to all regulations, attacked our schools, hospitals, and infrastructure and is hated in the world," he said, as reported by the ISNA news agency.
Iran's Parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the country's main negotiator in mediated talks with the US, acknowledged the strain on Iran's economy in comments to Iranian and Iraqi businesspeople late on Thursday.
"No matter how much military power we have, we will not survive if people are hungry and we do not have financial turnover, economic growth, and national production," he said, as reported by official news agency IRNA.
