Flights and Banking Cut Off as 'Economic Outcast' Tightens
Turkey, Oman and the United Arab Emirates have halted flights by Iranian airlines, and some banks in the Emirates and Turkey have stopped transactions with Iran, the American treasury secretary said. Scott Bessent thanked Turkey, Oman, the Emirates and the United Kingdom for their cooperation, saying the campaign was “delivering results”. The rial is trading at record lows. Washington has named the blockade “Operation Economic Outcast”.
Britain’s inclusion in that list of thanks is the detail worth noting, since it places London inside an economic campaign the government has said little about publicly. The diplomatic case is being made in numbers: the American ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz, said a record 146 countries have condemned Iran over attacks on civilian shipping, describing Tehran’s maritime operations as “acts of desperation” and arguing it is increasingly isolated. The obvious hole in the strategy is China, Iran’s largest oil customer, which has ignored previous sanctions and kept trading, and which is pushing in the opposite direction — Xi Jinping told the president last week that Beijing backed a return to the June agreement reached in Islamabad. Economists doubt the measures bite without Beijing. Aviation and banking, though, are where sanctions work fastest. Watch the rial.