Treasury Secretary Urges Squashing Iran's Economy
The verb chosen by the Treasury secretary - to “squash” - is worth pausing over before the policy content is even examined, because no institution accidentally reaches for agricultural imagery when duller words were available. One does not “squash” an economy through the ordinary bureaucratic vocabulary of sanctions regimes, designations, and correspondent-banking restrictions; one “squashes” an insect, a rumor, a rebellion by peasants. The word is not a description of the mechanism. It is a ceremonial flourish appended to a mechanism that will, in practice, proceed through the same tedious apparatus of OFAC designations and SWIFT exclusions regardless of what verb accompanies it. The theatre and the plumbing are separate operations, and it is the theatre that was addressed to the assembled allies.
The stated purpose of urging international partners to align behind the squeeze on Iran’s economy is, of course, coordination - the productive function, in the official telling, is to close the loopholes that a partial sanctions regime always leaves open, so that capital cannot simply route itself through Frankfurt or Dubai when Washington’s doors are shut. But coordination of that kind does not require public urging. It requires closed-door technical meetings between Treasury officials and their counterpart finance ministries, the sort of meeting that produces no photograph and no adjective. The public urging performs a different service entirely: it asks each ally to make a visible gesture of allegiance, to be seen choosing a side in a dispute that most of them would prefer to observe from a comfortable distance. This is not unlike the position of a guest at a dinner party who is asked, in front of the other guests, whether he agrees that the neighbor two houses down has behaved disgracefully - the honest answer being “it’s complicated,” the socially required answer being enthusiastic agreement, and the value of the ritual residing precisely in the gap between the two.
The institutional map beneath this ritual is familiar to anyone who has traced the personnel of American economic statecraft across the last two decades. The Treasury’s sanctions apparatus does not operate in isolation; it feeds a considerable secondary industry of compliance consultancies, sanctions-screening software vendors, and law firms whose partners rotate in and out of the Office of Foreign Assets Control with a regularity that would embarrass a less self-serious profession. Every expansion of the squeeze on Iran’s economy is also, without any need for coordination or malice, an expansion of the addressable market for the firms that help banks in London, Singapore, and Seoul determine whether a given transaction might touch a sanctioned Iranian entity three counterparties removed. The allies being urged to align are not merely being asked to share a foreign policy judgment; they are being asked to fund, through their own domestic compliance sectors, an apparatus whose growth is now structurally independent of whether the underlying policy achieves anything against Iran at all.
What the public urging reveals, then, is an institution whose declared purpose - degrading the capacity of an adversary state - has become secondary to its declared audience. The message is not really addressed to Tehran, which will adjust to whatever restrictions materialize regardless of the rhetoric that precedes them, the way a river adjusts to a new dam without needing to be informed of the dam’s moral justification. The message is addressed to Berlin, Tokyo, Riyadh, and a dozen other capitals whose value to Washington in this instance is not economic but ceremonial: their public alignment is the product being manufactured, the sanctions themselves being merely the occasion for manufacturing it.
A field observer unfamiliar with this civilisation’s customs, presented with a public call to international partners to support a plan to “squash” a national economy, would reasonably conclude that the institution issuing the call values the visible loyalty of its allies considerably more than it values precision in describing its own instruments. Such an observer would note, further, that the household two doors down has heard every word.