The United States and Iran traded defiant messages ahead of Monday’s expected announcement of new U.S. economic sanctions targeting Iran and potentially key trading partners such as China.
Nearly six months into the war, the two sides were no longer exchanging fire but had made little progress toward peace talks. Meanwhile, oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz have virtually halted as Tehran seeks to preserve its leverage by threatening to strike unauthorized tankers attempting to pass through the strategic waterway.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is scheduled to hold a news conference at 2:00 p.m. EDT (6:00 p.m. GMT) Monday, when he is expected to unveil what Washington has described as “the toughest sanctions in history” against Iran and urge China to cooperate with the United States.
China buys more than 80% of Iran’s seaborne oil exports, according to 2025 data from analytics firm Kpler. Beijing has called for diplomacy and a negotiated resolution.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said Saturday that the expected U.S. sanctions announcement amounted to 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.
U.S. President Donald Trump, who has warned of economic consequences for any country that provides “any type of lifeline to Iran,” said Friday that Washington was watching “what happens” in the conflict.
“They would love to make a deal, but they’re not ready to make the right deal, in my opinion,” Trump said of Iran.
While the U.S. has effectively blockaded Iranian vessels in their ports, the Strait of Hormuz remained bottled up, with thousands of seafarers stranded on hundreds of vessels. Only four commodity ships sailed through the strait Thursday, none of them large crude carriers or liquefied natural gas tankers, according to ship-tracking data.
However, Iran has granted permission for a number of Iraqi oil tankers to pass through the Strait following repeated requests from Baghdad, Iran’s state news agency IRNA reported Saturday.
IRNA said obtaining special permission for Iraqi tankers was one of Baghdad’s main requests during Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf’s visit to Iraq.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the U.S. military helped move a seven-day average of 8 million barrels of oil a day through the strait. That is down from more than 20 million barrels a day before the war, or about one of every five barrels consumed worldwide.
U.S. attacks have severely damaged Iran’s economy and devastated its navy and air force, but Tehran maintains enough missile and drone capabilities to impede oil tanker traffic and attack regional rivals.
Trump, meanwhile, has yet to achieve objectives he set at the start of the war, such as dismantling Iran’s nuclear program. The status of the program remains uncertain because U.N. inspectors have been shut out since 2025. Trump has also sought to create conditions for Iranians to overthrow their clerical rulers.
Thousands have been killed, including 168 Iranian schoolchildren on the first day of the war. The U.S. has reported more than 750 military personnel wounded and 18 killed.
The chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, Maj. Gen. Ali Abdollahi, promised Friday that Iran would respond to enemy threats militarily with “crushing, punishing and devastating responses.”
Still, 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 emphasizes that America, contrary to all regulations, attacked our schools, hospitals and infrastructure and is hated in the world,” Pezeshkian said, according to the ISNA news agency.
Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the country’s main negotiator in mediated talks with the U.S., acknowledged the strain on Iran’s economy in comments to Iranian and Iraqi businesspeople late Thursday.
“No matter how much military power we have, we won’t survive if people are hungry and we don’t have financial turnover, economic growth and national production,” Qalibaf said, according to the official IRNA news agency.
