United States President Donald Trump has threatened to financially punish any country providing an economic “lifeline” to Iran, as he declared an “economic D-Day” against Tehran. The threat, six months into the US’s costly conflict with Iran, is Trump’s latest attempt to wield US economic power to achieve his foreign policy objectives, after a series of damaging trade wars earlier in his second term in office. But Trump’s leverage over China and Russia, two important trade partners with Iran, is limited, analysts say.
Russia is already under sweeping US sanctions and operates largely outside the US-led economic framework. China, meanwhile, has repeatedly shown it is willing to ignore US sanctions when doing so serves its own economic interests. Paul Musgrave, an associate professor of government at Georgetown University in Qatar, told Al Jazeera that “it is going to be very difficult” for Trump to pull off his pressure campaign effectively.
In a post on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday, the US president said his campaign against Iran would be “the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country”. In addition, he said there would be “tremendous economic consequences” for countries that help Iran subvert US sanctions, citing methods such as “oil smuggling, swap lines, cash transfers, exchange houses, ship registries [and] front companies”. Earlier the same day, the United Arab Emirates, which Iran has long relied on for critical imports and access to commercial markets, announced an indefinite trade embargo on Tehran, after accusing Iran’s military of launching two ballistic missiles at its territory.
Nader Habibi, a Middle East economics professor at Brandeis University, said he believed the US “strongly encouraged or induced” the UAE to impose the trade embargo, and that the US may also seek to pressure other Iranian trade partners, including its biggest one, China. Any US plan to disrupt China-Iran trade is likely to face significant hurdles. While China bought 80 percent of Iran’s shipped oil in 2025, according to data from analytics firm Kpler, going after China’s oil refineries is often challenging because most are independent with little reliance on the US financial system.
And while sanctioning the major Chinese banks if they process Iranian funds, as the US Treasury has threatened, would sting, it could also push China to hit back during a sensitive diplomatic period. Yu Jie, a senior research fellow at the Chatham House think tank’s China, Asia Pacific Programme, said Trump’s threat to target Iran’s economic allies “won’t alter China’s involvement and the existing trading relationship with Iran”. Musgrave said any “aggressive” secondary sanctions the US applies on Iran would be hugely significant, but that Trump likely would not want to jeopardise the US-China economic relationship given that the two countries are “in kind of an economic Cold War at the moment”.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian has responded to Trump’s economic pressure campaign by saying more sanctions would “not help to solve the issue”. The US has tried to keep tensions with China at bay ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s planned visit to Washington next month. During that and two other potential meetups between the leaders later this year, “prolonged conflict in the Gulf is one of the items both sides will discuss,” said Yu, “but it won’t be the most important item”.
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