The $8 Trillion War Machine That Can't Beat Sandals — Now Wants to Fight Iran
When US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News in January 2026 that "their economy collapsed" and "this is why the people took to the street," he wasn't describing an accident. He was taking a victory lap. The billionaire hedge-fund manager turned top financial official was bragging about deliberately engineering a dollar shortage inside Iran — a policy he himself described as "designed to
collapse its already buckling economy" during a speech at the Economic Club of New York, surrounded by applauding Wall Street executives, with Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman sitting directly behind him on stage. "We saw a major bank go under. The central bank has started to print money. There is a dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports," Bessent gloated. "And this is why the people
took to the street. So this is economic statecraft. No shots fired." The quiet part, said out loud, with a smile — sanctions are not diplomacy. They are siege warfare against 93 million civilians, dressed in the language of policy papers. This is not new. In 2012, the Obama White House published a press release boasting of "grinding the Iranian economy to a halt" and imposing "even more crippling
sanctions." World Bank data shows a near-perfect correlation: every round of US sanctions — Bush in 2006, Obama in 2010, Trump in 2018, Trump again in 2025 — is followed by an immediate spike in Iranian inflation. When the JCPOA nuclear deal lifted sanctions in 2015, inflation fell to 7.2%, the lowest in decades. When Trump tore up the deal in 2018, it shot back to 39.9%. The pattern is not