Iran’s Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi has brushed aside Washington’s latest sanctions threat, calling it nothing more than an old trick dressed up in new packaging. Speaking on the sidelines of a ceremony Araghchi told state broadcaster IRIB that the US has little choice but to change its tone towards Tehran. “America has no choice but to speak respectfully to the Iranian people,” he said.
The top diplomat waved away suggestions that Washington was cooking up some fresh economic manoeuvre, insisting instead that this was simply Washington falling back on a script it has used time and again. “The economic operation that Trump claims is a recurring scenario and the same old bullying in American politics. In a sense, it is a recurring movie that we have watched many times, and we know how to deal with it,” he said, according to IRIB.
For Araghchi, the return to economic arm-twisting says more about Washington’s frustration than its strength. He argued that repeated pressure campaigns, following on from military action, only expose the lack of fresh ideas in the American playbook. “The fact that they have returned to the same old plans after the military operations and the fact that we are doing this and that shows that they are desperate. They cannot think of any solution against the great nation of Iran, and they are constantly putting repetitive plans into action,” he said.
He went further, insisting that sanctions campaigns of any size have never managed to break the resolve of ordinary Iranians and never will.
His comments follow Donald Trump’s announcement of what he dubbed an “Economic D-Day” push against Iran, a campaign he billed as the harshest economic squeeze ever placed on any nation. Trump framed it as “Economic Warfare and Isolation on an unprecedented scale” and urged American allies to fall in line and help isolate Tehran.
Iran’s response has been swift and united. A day earlier, First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref hit back at Trump’s plan on X, arguing that history proves economic pressure simply doesn’t work on Iran; if anything, it tends to backfire. “The government will not allow America’s economic terrorism to target the economic stability and livelihoods of the people,” Aref wrote, adding that “the experience of the Islamic Revolution has shown that economic pressure is incapable of altering the will of the Iranian nation and instead yields the opposite result.”
Tehran’s officials remain adamant that Washington’s earlier rounds of sanctions failed to force any change in course, and that doubling down now will likely achieve just as little.
