Category: News

Facing a fresh economic assault from the United States, Iran’s leaders are gambling that they can weather the coming storm and make the cost of their suffering felt in an oil-rich region that is critical to the global economy.

As Iran’s ever more devastating economic crisis deepens, experts warn, Iranian leaders may feel they have little to lose by responding to U.S. pressure with the kind of military escalation President Donald Trump now seems keen to avoid.

“The danger is that ‘economic D-Day’ is being presented almost as a substitute for further war when it may instead become another mechanism for escalating it,” said Sina Toossi, an Iran expert at the Center for International Policy. “The harder Washington pushes third countries to sever Iran’s remaining lifelines, the stronger Tehran’s incentive becomes to demonstrate that participating in Iran’s isolation carries costs of its own.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday announced a new package of U.S. measures to disrupt Iran’s economy, although he offered few details. The success of the U.S. efforts will also depend on how much the Trump administration can persuade other countries to go along with its plan — especially critical trade partners for Iran, such as Turkey, Russia, and China.

Still, as the Trump administration reached for military metaphors to convey the severity of its plans — calling them an “economic D-Day”— Iran responded in kind. Iranian officials have labeled the U.S. campaign the next phase of the war that Washington has waged since U.S.-Israeli strikes were launched in February.

Economic warfare is the “main battlefield” in the current confrontation, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was quoted as saying in a statement Monday cited by Press TV, an Iranian state news outlet.

In statements broadcast after Bessent’s news conference, Iran’s economy minister, Ali Madanizadeh, warned that the country would find ways to push back.

“The enemies intend to launch an economic terrorist attack on us, but we also have our own tools and know how to play the game,” he said, in comments carried by the semiofficial news agency, Tasnim.

A day before Bessent’s announcements, Iran’s top security chief, Mohsen Rezaei, vowed that “not a single drop” of oil would leave the region if its Persian Gulf neighbors joined the U.S. effort, and that they would be considered enemy states.

The severity of the Iranian warnings also highlights just how bad Iran’s current economic crisis is — and it is worsening by the day.

A report Monday by Iran’s most prominent economic newspaper, Donya-e-Eghtesad, said Iran’s rial has depreciated to new lows. It has plummeted 41% since December, when the currency rate sparked protests that morphed into weeks of nationwide unrest. Iranian security forces responded with a deadly crackdown.

Inflation and unemployment have soared, with prices of everyday goods increasingly out of reach for many Iranians. At the same time, the U.S. strikes that damaged Iranian energy infrastructure and the ongoing U.S. naval blockade have intensified an ever-worsening fuel supply crisis — an issue that sparked massive protests in 2019.

But Iranian officials are projecting confidence that their leadership can survive because this new wave of U.S. measures looks similar to old ones. For decades, U.S. leaders have vowed to devastate the Iranian economy through ever harsher sanctions that the Islamic Republic’s leaders have learned to withstand.

Iran’s leadership “has been planning to confront U.S. sanctions for a long time and is fully prepared for new sanctions,” Madanizadeh said late Monday. He said the government had a two-year plan in place for dealing with such sanctions.

Iran’s ability to withstand the Trump administration’s economic pressure campaign will depend on the attitude of Iran’s key trading partners.

Mahdi Ghodsi, an economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, said that “faced with sufficiently credible secondary-sanctions risks,” those trading partners may “prefer to protect their much more important financial and commercial interests with the United States and reduce the services they provide to Iranian entities.”

Some analysts also warn that the brunt of further economic pain is likely to be borne by ordinary Iranians, not Iran’s leaders.

Among the sectors Bessent identified as being targeted in the new U.S. campaign were gold, digital assets, technology, aviation, and shipping — sectors that Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, who heads the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, a London-based think tank focused on Iran’s economy, called “lifelines for the Iranian people.”

“Digital assets and gold are how ordinary Iranians protect their savings from inflation,” he wrote in a social media post. “Technology keeps Iranians connected with the world. Aviation keeps Iranian families connected with loved ones across borders. Shipping is how essential goods, including food and medicine, reach Iran.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

The State Department wants to sell a painting by celebrated artist Kehinde Wiley that the director of its Art in Embassies program called “very woke” and “aesthetically terrifying.” It was removed from the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic last week.

The painting by Wiley, who rose to fame after being selected to create President Barack Obama’s official portrait, features four Dominican models against a floral backdrop. It was commissioned by the federal government in 2013 and paid for with taxpayer dollars.

State Department officials removed the painting from the embassy last week, after first hiding it behind a tarp designed with an image of the American flag.

Erin Scavino, the director of Art in Embassies, criticized Wiley’s painting in a recent podcast interview and pointed out the artist’s connection to Obama. Leah Campos, the U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, celebrated its removal on social media with a video playing the rock anthem “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” writing that the painting was an example of “globalist and woke ideologies.”

Neither elaborated on what she found objectionable.

In a statement on Monday about the removal of the painting, a State Department spokesperson did not directly address the artwork. The statement instead criticized comments Wiley had made in 2023 about his “Judith and Holofernes” painting, which he described as “a play on the ‘kill whitey’ thing.” It also cited accusations of sexual assault that Wiley has denied.

“The work of an individual with such violent and racist words and depictions has no place in the America First State Department,” the spokesperson said.

The statement said the State Department is determining whether it can legally sell the painting of Dominicans, which is titled “Young Artists After Siamesas 1960.”

“If that is feasible,” the spokesperson said, “it would be the goal of Art in Embassies to proudly do so.”

A smaller painting by the artist sold at a Phillips auction in 2024 for nearly $845,000. Wiley and his gallerist, Sean Kelly, did not respond to requests for comment.

Virginia Shore, who commissioned the Wiley painting, established many of the embassy art collections as director of acquisitions and chief curator for the Art in Embassies program between 2000 and 2017. She described the work as nonpartisan and said there was no precedent for selling embassy artworks.

“Calling this woke is difficult for me to understand,” she said. “This is a program validated and financially backed under Bush. There is a science of building trust and empathy across borders.”

Wiley received an award from the State Department in 2015 because of his contributions to cultural diplomacy. He often takes inspiration from historic paintings, asking contemporary Black models to pose inside his version of the compositions. For “Young Artists After Siamesas 1960,” he spent two years studying paintings by Dominican artists Celeste Woss y Gil and Gilberto Hernández Ortega, working with art students in the country to finish the scene.

The artwork’s removal was the latest attempt to politicize the State Department’s art program, which became part of the government during the Kennedy administration in 1963 to foster cultural diplomacy. The program was strengthened in 1999 under the Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act, which led to embassies developing their own permanent art collections.

This year, Scavino claimed to have gotten an ambassador in Bucharest, Romania, fired over “satanic baby art,” though the diplomat’s departure was reported as a planned retirement. She also selected a friend with no curatorial experience to serve as the commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, bypassing normal procedures. In July, Scavino organized an exhibition in Washington that aimed to “Make Art Great Again” with nearly 70 versions of the American flag on display.

In a statement about the removed Wiley painting, Campos, the U.S. ambassador, said, “It is my intention that everything we project from U.S. Embassy Santo Domingo, including the art and décor, reflect the beauty, strength, and commitment to liberty of the United States of America and its people.”

Online, she had a stronger perspective: “Under the Trump administration and my leadership, we are leaving behind globalist, ‘woke’ ideologies to embrace, instead, American patriotism and the beauty of our great country.”

She ended the sentence with an emoji of the American flag.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.