No sooner had Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the latest tool for achieving what he said would be the “economic asphyxiation” of Iran than he revealed the reason he was reluctant to use it.Secondary sanctions—penalties on countries, individuals, or entities that do business with Iran—are ready to go, Bessent announced to reporters in the Treasury’s ornate Cash Room yesterday. But he went out of his way not to name the chief offenders that help Tehran: China and Russia. So, Bessent was asked, why threaten rather than just do it, particularly after President Trump last week warned of economic warfare “on an unprecedented scale” if Iran doesn’t surrender to U.S. demands?“Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?” Bessent responded, explaining that the administration is offering a bureaucratic grace period before the hammer falls. Secondary sanctions, he insisted, “are a very powerful tool.” Which is true. But the administration has repeatedly offered vivid explanations of what its powerful weapons can do, be they military or financial, and then declined to use them. Remember when Trump threatened to erase Iran as a civilization? The warnings may be intended to intimidate, but the lack of follow-through instead exposes just how narrow the administration’s options in Iran have become.The possibilities for ending the war have been steadily closed off. The list of useful military targets is diminishing, and munitions stockpiles are perilously depleted, while the tools that were supposed to do what missiles could not—sanctions, blockades, financial pressure—have failed to produce the Iranian capitulation Washington promised. Iran has absorbed enormous damage, both military and economic, without surrendering its capacity to fight. And the countries that matter most to the financial-pressure campaign, including China and Russia, have shown little inclination to help Washington finish the job.Soon after Trump took office last year, he announced that he was “restoring maximum pressure” on Iran, directing his administration to tighten sanctions and drive down Iranian oil exports. Eighteen months later, Bessent is promising what he describes as the “toughest sanctions in history.” Maximum pressure, it appears, has a sequel, much as Trump’s contention last June that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been obliterated was followed in February by a war to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities.Trump, in a Truth Social post last week, hinted at what that sequel to maximum pressure would look like. “ANY country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences,” he wrote, before listing oil smuggling, financial swap lines, cash transfers, exchange houses, ship registries, and front companies that “all” need to stop “NOW.” It was the kind of warning designed to make the entire global financial system sit up straight. Then Bessent arrived at the Cash Room making equally stark threats, before pointing to a major reason why he shouldn’t follow through, assuming countries don’t voluntarily comply. That leaves the administration in an uncomfortable position. The war has lasted far longer than Trump suggested it would, and its economic consequences are now a central issue in the midterm elections. Sanctions have inflicted economic pain on Iran for years without producing the result Washington wants. Yet China continues to buy Iranian oil, while Russia and other oil-producing countries stand to benefit from the drain of prolonged U.S. military action in Iran and from disruptions to energy exported from the Persian Gulf. “No one is above the reach of U.S. sanctions,” Bessent said when asked about China specifically.But Beijing and Moscow might not comply with Bessent’s demands. The Russian embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington told me in a written statement that “sanctions and pressure tactics do no help in resolving issues” and called on all parties to “act rationally” and to avoid doing anything “that may further escalate tensions or deal a blow to global economic growth and financial stability.” The spokesperson added that China will watch the developments and “do what is necessary to protect our legitimate rights and interests.”[Read: The forever negotiation]The administration’s threats have yielded some results. The United Arab Emirates last week said it was stopping all trade and financial transactions with Tehran. Asked about the announcement by the UAE, Bessent suggested the timing was no coincidence. He added that Trump was speaking with world leaders to deliver his ultimatum personally.But although the U.S. can certainly make Iran’s relationships more expensive, it can’t wish them away. I tried to gauge how worried officials from around the world were about these threats of economic annihilation for the noncompliant. One Arab official told me they hoped “those countries”—this person, too, declined to name China or Russia—would “take this seriously.” A European official was less impressed. “We’ll see,” this person said, before quickly changing the subject to Trump’s trade wars with allies, which appears to command considerably more European attention.Bessent may have been full of bravado. But his caution is also well-founded. Following through with the full slate of secondary sanctions against all offenders would indeed be devastating to the global economy. “These tools are so potent,” Jason Prince, a sanctions attorney at the Washington-based law firm Akin Gump who previously served as a lawyer at the Treasury Department, told me. Announcing secondary sanctions, even as a threat, is an economic gamble, Prince said, with “a chilling effect that has repercussions that reverberate well beyond Iran.”Bessent also announced immediate sanctions on nearly 60 Iran-linked entities, people, and vessels, accusing them of having links to Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, cyber activities, and oil shipments. He added that the first major secondary sanctions against “a financial institution” are likely to come “by the end of this week.”Prince said that the latter threat will be key for the administration’s credibility. “They have to take some sort of action, or the de-risking and the retreat by the real targets isn’t going to take place,” he told me. He said similar measures were taken against Russian banks after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But Sberbank, the titan of Russian banking, was first placed on a less severe sanctions list—a reflection, in part, of the impact that sanctioning the bank would have globally. (Tougher sanctions on the bank were eventually imposed as Russian attacks on Ukraine continued.)The problem here, Prince added, is that secondary sanctions make the U.S. more vulnerable when its own economy is already under pressure, with the technology, manufacturing, and financial sectors likely to bear the brunt. Oil and gasoline prices have already risen, inflation remains a problem, and voters are unhappy with a conflict they were told would make their country safer. The American public’s approval of the war with Iran has fallen to its lowest level since the first days of the conflict, with just 31 percent supporting U.S. military action against Iran, while Trump’s popularity also sits at a record low, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. With the midterms approaching, Republicans have little reason to welcome another round of economic pain, let alone the possible U.S.-induced global financial crisis that Bessent talked about.[Read: From ‘indispensable’ ally to target of annihilation]Regional experts I spoke with see sanctions threats like this less as an escalation strategy than as the latest step in the administration’s continuing search for an exit from the war. The administration keeps reaching for a bigger threat because the last one failed to deliver a decisive victory, or even a face-saving off-ramp. Deadlines move. Threats get grace periods. “Maximum pressure” is followed by more maximum pressure. The question is no longer simply how Washington plans to force Iran to negotiate. It is how the U.S. gets out of a war in which its options seem only to shrink.Leverage depends not just on possessing the power to punish, but on the willingness to use that power. If Washington repeatedly announces a deadline and then moves it, threatens a consequence and then delays, or unveils a weapon and immediately explains why it cannot be fully deployed, its adversaries don’t see geopolitical might—instead, they learn something about the limits of American power.Bessent threatened a sanctions regime so severe that countries around the world would have to choose between doing business with Iran and having access to the U.S. dollar system. Bessent and Trump described the announcement as an “economic D-Day,” but that is not an apt comparison. The real D-Day, on June 6, 1944, was an actual invasion. It came without a public ultimatum or a warning to the enemy about what was coming. This operation, officially dubbed “Operation Economic Outcast,” has both put countries on notice while also delivering a message that the U.S. will go only so far.“We believe that it is important to level-set, and give people a cure period,” Bessent told reporters. “But they should know that that will move very quickly and that we are serious,” he added. “If people do not want to meet our expectations, then we expect, and they should expect, that they will leave the dollar system.”[Read: Iran unleashed]Even here, the administration appears to be discovering that maximum pressure is easier to announce than to impose. After all, Iran has been under U.S. sanctions for decades. Those have undoubtedly done damage to the Iranian economy but have done nothing to push Iran closer to the negotiating table in search of a lasting peace with Washington. When Iran entered into the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal, the relief it received in return came from the lifting of U.S. secondary sanctions. Prince told me secondary sanctions could reinstate that leverage. “There’s at least that historical precedent,” he said, “that the more secondary sanctions pressure that can be applied, the more leverage the U.S. government believes it has with respect to the Iranians.”But Steve H. Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, told me the economic reality, to date, is that sanctions against Iran have had “a near-perfect record of failure.”“Just look at the plethora of sanctions that have been placed on Iran since the Islamic Revolution of 1979—they have all failed to achieve their stated objectives,” Hanke, who served on President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, said. “The D-Day sanctions will meet the same fate.”The military campaign has failed to produce the quick resolution Trump once promised. Now the economic campaign is in danger of following suit, while also adding to the domestic costs of war.