Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unveiled Operation Economic Outcast, warning that any entity doing business with Tehran risks being cut off from the dollar system. Proft noted the administration followed that announcement with sanctions against a cluster of Islamist and leftist groups, including the UK-based Palestine Action, an entity operating as a front for the U.S.-designated Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and an Italy-based firm accused of supplying digital infrastructure to Antifa-linked networks and other violent extremist movements.
Dan Proft turned to Matthew Gould, a former British ambassador to Israel and former deputy ambassador to Iran, to ask whether the Trump administration properly understands what actually drives the Iranian regime, and whether recent public statements from Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf about the economic toll of the war should be taken at face value. Gould, drawing on a recent Washington Post piece he wrote on the subject, said the single most important thing to understand about the regime is that it is overwhelmingly focused on its own survival, aware that a large share of the Iranian public would welcome its collapse. He said the regime is also unusually fractured and paranoid internally, a dynamic he said has intensified since many of its top leaders were killed at the outset of the conflict, leaving officials who remain more inclined to posture as hardline in order to protect their own standing.
Asked why that instability hasn’t translated into a broader uprising, Gould pointed to the brutal crackdown the regime carried out on protests earlier in the year, describing mass killings that included raids on hospitals to remove people who had helped organize demonstrations. He said the Iranian public remains deeply alienated from its own government but is also traumatized by that violence, and that many potential opposition leaders were killed in the crackdown. Gould said the regime’s fractured, insecure character does not equate to genuine instability so long as it retains a monopoly on force and has not seen meaningful defections within the armed forces or the Revolutionary Guard, since even nervous officials still share an overriding interest in regime survival.
On the sanctions campaign itself, Gould said the U.S. approach needs to rest on three things: patience, since economic pressure takes time to bite; consistency between stated threats and follow-through, since he said the regime is skilled at detecting empty threats and will discount future warnings once it does; and a willingness to escalate as far as necessary. He said the real test of the campaign is whether the administration is prepared to take action against a major Chinese bank in a way that would meaningfully disrupt China’s ability to trade with Iran, arguing that sanctions limited to smaller entities, refiners or individual tankers are helpful but ultimately marginal without addressing that underlying trade relationship.
Gould said there is room for Western European governments to coordinate more closely with Washington on the campaign, particularly on money laundering networks, smuggling routes and Iranian disinformation efforts, framing it as an area of shared interest regardless of earlier disagreements over the military dimension of the conflict. He cautioned, however, that while Iran’s economy is genuinely suffering, with high inflation, even higher food inflation and rising unemployment, the regime’s center of gravity sits with the Revolutionary Guard rather than with more moderate public-facing figures like Ghalibaf and Pezeshkian, and that the leadership will only change course once the economic pain genuinely threatens its own survival. Asked whether new UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham is likely to be a more willing partner on financial interdiction efforts than his predecessor, Gould said it remains unclear, noting Burnham spent most of the past several years as mayor of Manchester and has said little publicly about foreign policy either before or since taking office.