Donald Trump wants to squeeze Iran until its economy can no longer breathe. Iran wants the squeeze to travel around the Strait of Hormuz, gather oil tankers, shipping costs and fuel prices along the way, and fly straight back at him.
Call it the Hormuz boomerang.
The United States has announced what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described as an “economic D-Day” against Iran, promising the greatest financial offensive Washington has ever mounted against an adversary. Tehran has answered with its own escalation: charge selected ships for crossing the Strait of Hormuz, punish vessels that defy Iranian protocols and, if the American campaign continues, prevent oil from leaving the Persian Gulf altogether.
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The confrontation, in other words, has moved from missiles to money. That does not necessarily make it safer.
“We are now entering the endgame,” Bessent wrote on X, declaring that the Trump administration would deploy “every agency, every authority and action many assumed we would never summon”.
Its objective, he said, was to “sever every economic lifeline” sustaining the Iranian government until Tehran stood alone.
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The full machinery of Washington’s latest campaign is expected to become clearer when the Treasury unveils its measures. The language, however, already points towards a sanctions offensive extending far beyond Iran.
For economic isolation to work, the United States would have to pursue the banks, shipping companies, insurers, intermediaries and countries that continue doing business with Tehran. Bessent has urged American allies to join the campaign and warned governments weighing cooperation with Iran not to underestimate the cost of testing Washington.
Iran, however, is making precisely the opposite calculation. If the United States turns every trade route into a pressure point, Tehran appears ready to turn the Strait of Hormuz into one. “If the economic war continues, not a single drop of oil will be exported,” Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, warned in a post on X.
“Neither through the Strait of Hormuz nor from anywhere in the Persian Gulf.”
Rezaei went further, saying Iran would treat another country’s participation in or support for America’s economic campaign as “an act of war”.
That threat places Washington’s allies in a difficult position. Supporting American sanctions may expose them to Iranian retaliation. Refusing to cooperate may invite financial punishment from the United States.
Caught between the two are the ships carrying the world’s energy.
The Strait of Hormuz connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. Before the present conflict disrupted traffic, roughly 20 million barrels of oil passed through it each day, equivalent to about one-fifth of global petroleum-liquids consumption, according to the US Energy Information Administration. The EIA estimates that flows plunged to about 4.9 million barrels a day in the second quarter of 2026, down from 21.6 million in the final quarter of 2025.
That is why Iran does not need to stop every tanker to hurt the world economy. Uncertainty can do part of the job.
Every threat of detention raises the risk premium. Every warning to shipowners complicates insurance. Every doubt about passage can lift freight rates, disrupt supplies and eventually reach consumers through the price of petrol, diesel, aviation fuel and transported goods.
Tehran is now trying to give its pressure campaign a legal and financial structure
An Iranian parliamentary committee has approved a provision that would allow the country to collect fees from ships belonging to countries permitted to use the strait. The proposed charges would cover navigation, environmental assistance, insurance, security, refuelling under certain conditions and other services.
Payments could be collected in Iranian rials or another currency designated by Tehran, according to the committee spokesperson quoted by Iran’s official news agency and reported by Anadolu Agency.
For now, it remains a provision in a draft law advanced by the committee, rather than a fully operational toll regime. Politically, though, its message is unmistakable: Iran wants to decide who may pass, under what conditions and at what cost.
Iran’s Ports and Maritime Organization has separately warned that vessels violating its protocols could face fines, detention, confiscation or restrictions on future passage. Ships conducting transfers or other business with vessels Tehran has listed as non-compliant could themselves be added to the list.
This is economic warfare conducted with toll barriers, blacklists and tanker manifests
It is also where Trump’s offensive risks becoming a boomerang. Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf supplied the metaphor himself. Mocking Washington’s threat of crushing sanctions, he posted a caricature showing an American economic weapon swinging back towards the person who had thrown it.
“A frozen foreign policy delivers a frozen economy,” Ghalibaf wrote. “The only thing still moving? The Iran boomerang.”
His argument is naturally self-serving. Decades of sanctions have inflicted deep damage on Iran, restricted investment, weakened its currency and complicated its access to international markets. A broader and more aggressively enforced campaign could make those pressures far worse.
But the boomerang contains an uncomfortable economic truth. Sanctions can deny Iran revenue. If Iran answers by choking Gulf exports, however, the resulting oil shock does not stop at Tehran. It travels through Asian refineries, European factories, American petrol stations and the budgets of countries that import most of their energy.
Washington is betting that Iran’s economy will break before those costs weaken international support for the campaign.
Tehran is betting that the rest of the world cannot tolerate prolonged disruption at Hormuz.
Both governments are therefore attempting to export pain. Trump wants countries to fear the price of trading with Iran. Iran wants them to fear the price of joining Trump.
Behind the bravado, there remain faint signals of diplomacy. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has spoken of ending the conflict while protecting Iran’s strength and dignity. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has dismissed the new sanctions threat as a “recurring scenario” but argued that Washington must speak respectfully if it wants negotiations.
For the moment, respect is in short supply.
Trump calls it an economic D-Day. Bessent calls it the endgame. Tehran calls participation an act of war and threatens to stop every drop of Gulf oil. The battlefield may have changed. The stakes have not. And the boomerang is already in the air.