Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent escalated his economic pressure messaging on Iran, telling Fox News, "There's only 15 million more barrels of Iranian oil on the water. Iran will have nothing left to trade for anything." He predicted that within roughly two weeks Tehran will make its final oil deliveries to China before its exportable supply runs dry entirely. The figure marks a steep drop from Bessent's own estimate just three weeks earlier, when he put Iran's remaining unsold crude at around 30 million barrels, underscoring how quickly the numbers have been falling under the administration's sanctions and naval blockade. Independent trade reporting broadly supports the trend Bessent describes: Iranian oil offers to Chinese buyers have declined sharply since mid-2026, with shrinking cargo volumes and rising prices as the pool of unsold, already-loaded barrels gets drawn down.

Bessent has framed the campaign, dubbed "Operation Economic Outcast," as the most aggressive economic isolation effort ever mounted against a single country, previously saying the goal is to "asphyxiate" Iran's ruling establishment financially. China has been the dominant buyer of Iranian crude throughout the standoff, though Bessent and other officials say Beijing's independent refiners have already cut their Iranian purchases by roughly 40 percent in recent months amid expanded US sanctions on so-called teapot refineries. Tanker-tracking data has shown a steady decline in Iranian oil reaching Chinese ports since the US reimposed its blockade in mid-2026, with virtually no new supertanker crossings of the Strait of Hormuz reported in the weeks since. Still, Bessent's specific two-week timeline for Iran's oil trade hitting zero is his own projection rather than an independently confirmed fact, and similar predictions of Iran's exports drying up have not always played out exactly on schedule in the past.