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Iran is down to roughly two months of gasoline as the U.S. blockade and President Donald Trump’s escalating economic offensive choke off the regime’s oil exports and remaining financial lifelines — a rapidly worsening crisis that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Friday branded the “Jaws of Death for the Iranian Economy.”
The extraordinary assessment came from inside the regime itself. Three senior Iranian sources told Reuters on Thursday that U.S. sanctions and the blockade are increasingly crippling Tehran’s ability to import critical goods, obtain foreign currency, and finance the costly networks it has long used to evade American restrictions.
Most strikingly, one of the officials said Iran — despite sitting atop some of the world’s largest oil reserves — has only about two months of gasoline remaining.
Iran’s battered refining infrastructure has left the country dependent on imported gasoline that it is increasingly unable to obtain, while the broader economic offensive is simultaneously stripping Tehran of the money and financial channels needed to circumvent U.S. sanctions.
For years, the regime relied on front companies, shadow banks, unregistered tankers, and sprawling smuggling networks to keep its oil and money moving. Those networks are now becoming increasingly ineffective as Washington closes financial channels abroad and the regime finds itself unable to afford the premium required to evade the sanctions still remaining.
Bessent put the consequences in stark terms Friday, declaring that no Iranian crude shipment has successfully made it through the Strait of Hormuz to China — Tehran’s largest oil customer — since Washington reinstated the blockade.
Iranian crude is instead piling up aboard vessels trapped inside the strait, Bessent said, leaving the regime with finite storage and rapidly disappearing oil revenue.
“Iran’s export lifeline is being cut off,” he wrote on X.
Bessent accompanied the warning with a Jaws-themed graphic declaring, “Jaws of Death for the Iranian Economy,” depicting both Iranian oil exports and the country’s currency plunging.
The striking imagery underscored the objective of an economic campaign the Trump administration has rapidly intensified over the past two weeks: prevent Iran from exporting its oil, then systematically close the financial networks Tehran could otherwise use to survive without it.
Acting under Trump’s direction, Bessent formally launched Operation Economic Outcast late last month as an “economic onslaught” aimed at isolating Iran from the global economy and ultimately collapsing the regime by cutting off the revenue sustaining it.
“This is economic asphyxiation of the regime,” Bessent declared at the rollout.
Treasury had already mapped the banks, businesses, vessels, front companies, and other networks Iran relied upon to evade sanctions, Bessent said, allowing Washington to pursue what he called a “zero-leakage approach” against Tehran’s remaining economic lifelines.
Foreign governments and businesses were simultaneously put on notice: continue doing business with Iran and risk losing access to the U.S. dollar-based financial system.
The financial offensive added a second front to a naval blockade already cutting Iran off physically from its principal source of revenue.
The scale of that blockade became dramatically clearer last Thursday, when CENTCOM Commander Adm. Brad Cooper announced a major milestone in the months-long U.S. campaign to wrest control of the Strait of Hormuz from Tehran: American forces had cleared Iranian sea mines from its internationally recognized shipping lanes, restoring growing two-way commercial traffic through the strategic waterway.
The result created an increasingly stark asymmetry.
American forces had helped protect nearly 1,500 commercial vessels carrying roughly 750 million barrels of crude through Hormuz even as the renewed blockade prevented Iran from exporting any oil from its own shores after mid-July, according to Cooper.
Bessent responded to the announcement by reducing the disparity to two numbers.
Over the previous 14 days, he noted, the United States had helped guide 130 million barrels through the strait.
“Iran: 0.”
“The Blockade and Operation Economic Outcast will crush the failing Iranian economy,” Bessent declared.
Within days, Tehran’s own leaders were publicly acknowledging precisely the kind of economic damage Washington said the strategy was designed to inflict.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian conceded last Friday that imports and exports had fallen between 25 and 35 percent as the blockade and sanctions prevented critical supplies from reaching the country.
“The route is now blocked, and goods are not coming in,” he acknowledged.
Then he identified one of those goods: gasoline.
Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf had already issued an even more fundamental warning about how long the regime could withstand deteriorating economic conditions, conceding that military strength alone would not save it if Iranians were left hungry and the economy ceased functioning.
“If people are hungry and we don’t have financial circulation, economic growth and domestic production, we will not endure,” Ghalibaf warned.
Bessent highlighted the extraordinary admissions from two of Iran’s most senior political figures as evidence that the administration’s strategy was already producing results before Economic Outcast had reached full force.
“Iran’s leadership is admitting what the world can now see: the pressure is working,” he wrote.
The economic indicators have continued moving sharply against Tehran.
The rial has since fallen beyond 2.2 million to the dollar, compared with roughly one million a year ago, while official figures cited by Reuters put average inflation at nearly 70 percent. The average monthly salary of roughly $125 now covers less than one-third of basic household expenses, according to the outlet.
Signs of desperation have increasingly emerged at street level as well. Fuel lines and panic buying have appeared amid tightening gasoline supplies; workers and pensioners have protested deteriorating living conditions, and some Iranians have reportedly begun selling burial plots reserved for themselves or relatives to raise desperately needed cash.
Washington, meanwhile, has continued closing the foreign channels Tehran needs to keep money moving.
The United Arab Emirates — long one of Iran’s most important commercial and financial hubs — halted financial dealings with Tehran last month, eliminating another major avenue the regime had relied upon to conduct international trade.
Treasury widened the offensive again Friday, sanctioning Turkey-based Golden Global Bank and two subsidiaries for allegedly providing Iran with international banking access and facilitating tens of millions of dollars in transactions benefiting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force.
The bank had also been used to move Iranian oil revenue from China into Turkey, where the funds could be converted into cash and gold — exactly the kind of sanctions-evasion architecture Economic Outcast was designed to dismantle.
“Financial institutions continue to find out the hard way that we are serious about Operation Economic Outcast,” Bessent said.
China itself is becoming an increasingly important part of the strategy.
President JD Vance said Thursday that Beijing has been “willing to play ball” with Washington’s effort to isolate Tehran economically, while stressing that China has not necessarily complied with every American request.
The issue is expected to figure prominently when Chinese President Xi Jinping visits the White House later this month, with Washington seeking to prevent Tehran from restoring access to the customer that has historically purchased the largest share of its crude.
The mounting economic damage has coincided with renewed efforts by Tehran to bring Washington back to the negotiating table.
Even as the conflict returned to direct military exchanges Tuesday, Pezeshkian said Iran was prepared to return to talks and resume its commitments under the June memorandum of understanding if Washington did the same — an agreement Tehran had previously violated by attacking commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump rejected the overture, arguing that Tehran had already squandered repeated opportunities to reach an agreement.
“I think an agreement with them isn’t worth the paper it’s written on,” Trump said Tuesday. “We gave them a lot of chances.”
The president went further later that night, saying he “couldn’t care less” whether Tehran signs what he called a “worthless” agreement and pointing instead to Washington’s “almost total control” of Hormuz and an Iranian economy he said was “totally collapsing.”
The administration has instead continued tightening the economic campaign while keeping renewed military action on the table — allowing growing volumes of international energy to move through Hormuz while Iran’s own crude remains bottled up and its remaining avenues for moving money abroad are systematically targeted.
Less than two weeks after Bessent launched Economic Outcast with a vow to economically “asphyxiate” Tehran, the strongest evidence of its impact is increasingly coming not from Washington, but from inside Iran itself.
The regime’s own president acknowledged last week that gasoline was no longer getting in.
Senior Iranian officials now say the country may have only two months left.
Joshua Klein is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.
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