There was one sentence in Scott Bessent’s Monday sanctions announcement that gave the whole game away. Anyone who launders money for the Iranian regime, the Treasury Secretary warned, “will be removed from the US dollar system.” He meant it as a threat of annihilation. It is, instead, a confession of the policy’s central weakness. The entire architecture of what Bessent has branded “Operation Economic Outcast” rests on a single assumption — that Iran and its trading partners need the U.S....

In my previous piece — The Walls Have Doors Now — I argued that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s promised “measures like have never been seen in the history of the economic isolation of a country” would push against an open frontier: an Iran with land bridges to Pakistan, military and intelligence lifelines to Russia and China, and, most consequentially, an oil trade that has walked out of the dollar entirely, settling in Chinese yuan through China’s CIPS clearing network beyond...