Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned Sunday that Iran will have “nothing left to trade for anything” within roughly two weeks as its remaining oil reaches China, arguing that the Trump administration’s economic campaign has brought Tehran “to its knees” and is driving the regime to seek a deal.
Bessent said only about 15 million barrels of Iranian oil remain on the water as the United States maintains its blockade of Iranian exports, leaving Tehran close to exhausting one of its remaining major sources of revenue.
“I am confident, given that there are only 15 million more barrels of Iranian oil on the water, that Iran will have nothing left to trade for anything,” Bessent told Fox News’s Larry Kudlow on Sunday Morning Futures.
Bessent put the remaining window at roughly two weeks.
“Probably within the next two weeks, they are going to make their final deliveries of oil to China, and then they will have nothing,” he said. “It is an empty set, and I believe they are feeling the pressure here and that’s why they want a deal.”
Bessent’s assessment comes as President Donald Trump has rejected Tehran’s latest proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz while signaling that negotiations could continue this week, saying Iran is now seeking terms Washington might have accepted before the war.
“They want to make a deal, but it is not the deal that I want to make,” Trump told Axios on Sunday. “It is what we would have maybe agreed to a year ago. They overplayed their hand.”
Bessent argued that the changing balance is visible in the strait itself, dismissing Iran’s offer to reopen the waterway within seven days as a concession when millions of barrels of oil from other countries are already moving through it under U.S. protection.
“The straits are open,” Bessent declared. “If you take out the Iranian oil, which we are not letting out, we’re averaging now 15 to 22 million barrels a day; it was at about 20 pre-conflict.”
Bessent cast the result as a stark measure of who now controls the flow of oil through the strait.
“Think of it this way: the score is United States, one billion — more than one billion barrels have gotten out — and Iran, zero.”
The blockade has increasingly worked in tandem with Operation Economic Outcast, the sweeping financial campaign Bessent launched at Trump’s direction in late August to sever Iran’s remaining economic lifelines and isolate the regime from the international financial system.
The campaign has extended far beyond Iran itself. Treasury officials have engaged more than 50 countries as Washington presses governments, banks, airlines, and businesses to choose between maintaining ties with Tehran and access to the United States. Jonathan Burke, Treasury’s assistant secretary for terrorist financing, recently traveled across the Middle East and Europe carrying that message directly to Iran’s trading partners.
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