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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Monday that the U.S. is slated to unleash new sanctions aimed at cutting off Iranian airlines from global travel, once again leveraging the U.S.’s vast power over the global financial system to further isolate Iran as the energy crisis spurred by the war rapidly worsens.
“On September 23rd, all the Iranian airlines, all the Iranian airlines will be shut down around the world,” said Bessent in an interview with CNBC on Monday.
He said that the sanctions would be imposed on actors who help with any part of an Iranian airline’s flight. “If they land, you cannot provide them with fuel. You cannot provide them with landing services, you cannot sell them tickets, or you will be knocked out of the dollar system,” he went on.
Bessent boasted that the U.S. has already implemented a host of secondary sanctions on banks that the U.S. accuses of providing support to the Iranian government, including in Egypt, Turkey, and Russia. He suggested that the Trump administration has also been having “behind the scenes discussions” with Chinese authorities, who Bessent said “have been very engaged in the process.”
These sanctions are being done under authorities granted to the president after 9/11, the treasury secretary said, which is “when we were given many of the authorities that we have now.”
The U.S. already imposed sanctions on 27 Iranian airlines earlier this month. Bessent said the sanctions were “a warning to anyone doing business with Iran’s remaining airlines, all of which we sanctioned today: You are at risk of being cut off from the global financial system.”
The measures will further cut off Iranian civilians from traveling abroad. Mahan Air, a top Iranian airline, already said prior to Bessent’s announcement that it was suspending flights to Oman and Turkey. And, as part of its sweeping sanctions regime this month, the U.S. already cut off Iranians from taking tests that allow students to apply to English-language graduate programs across the world.
Meanwhile, economic sanctions are increasingly squeezing Iranian civilians, who are the most severely affected by the wartime sanctions. Many Iranians have lost their jobs as the Iranian economy has shrunk by 10 percent between March 21 and June 20. Prices for regular goods like energy and food have skyrocketed — and, at the same time, the value of the rial has plummeted, making it doubly difficult for families to afford to live.
The sanctions on Iranian airlines may also raise costs to travel out of the country, in effect working to trap Iranian civilians as Trump makes genocidal threats against the entire country and its 92 million inhabitants.
On Sunday, President Donald Trump told Fox News’s Trey Yingst that he is in a “deciding mode” on Iran, and that “very big things” will be happening on the issue soon. Yingst said that Trump “described the current choices on the table as ‘wiping Iran out, letting them rot economically, or making a deal.’”
“My question is, if and when do I blow the entire nation up?” Trump said, per Yingst. “They better behave.” Such genocidal threats have become commonplace for Trump amid the war.
These comments come as the U.S. has been accused by independent UN officials of committing war crimes against civilians in Iran.
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