Donald Trump is making a different bet on Iran. If military power cannot force Tehran to capitulate, economic exhaustion might. Scott Bessent is expected to unveil a new campaign designed to push Iran towards near-total economic isolation, combining sanctions, the naval blockade and pressure on countries still facilitating Iranian trade. The strategy has logic. Iran’s economy is deteriorating rapidly. Inflation is above 80%, the rial has lost close to 30% this year, oil exports are reportedly at a near standstill, and the IMF expects the economy to contract by more than 6%. Pressure is working. That does not mean the strategy is working. This distinction is becoming crucial.

Economic pressure can weaken Iran’s capacity to sustain the war. But it does not necessarily weaken the Revolutionary Guards’ willingness to continue it. The IRGC does not face the same incentives as Iranian households, businesses or even the civilian government. The worse Iran’s economic position becomes, the greater its incentive may be to use the one asset sanctions cannot easily remove: its ability to impose costs on everybody else. That is where the strategy becomes dangerous. Washington assumes economic pain will eventually produce negotiation. Tehran may conclude that economic pain must instead be exported. The Gulf provides the mechanism. Iran does not need to defeat the United States militarily. It needs to make the cost of isolating Iran sufficiently high for Washington’s partners, global consumers, and, eventually, American voters.

Oil infrastructure is the obvious transmission channel. The disruption of Hormuz has already demonstrated how quickly a regional confrontation can become a global inflation shock. But the vulnerability is now spreading beyond Hormuz. Saudi Arabia redirected significant volumes of traffic to its Red Sea infrastructure precisely because the Persian Gulf had become dangerous. That alternative is itself increasingly threatened by the Houthis. Saudi tankers are now being forced into extraordinary logistical detours. Some vessels are travelling around Africa, while crude moving through the Red Sea is being redirected towards Egyptian infrastructure before continuing to customers. For Asian buyers, some routes can exceed 17,000 miles, more than twice the normal journey. Saudi exports remain below pre-war levels, while the additional shipping complexity is raising the delivered cost of oil.

This is what economic warfare against Iran risks provoking. Not necessarily a dramatic closure of one chokepoint. A multiplication of frictions across the entire regional energy system. Iran’s strategic advantage is that energy infrastructure is difficult to defend completely. Pipelines, refineries, ports, desalination plants, storage facilities and shipping routes form an enormous network of relatively exposed assets. Drones and missiles are cheap compared with the infrastructure they can disrupt. The asymmetry matters. Every additional sanction reduces Iranian economic options. But every reduction in those options increases the relative value of military disruption. This creates a dangerous feedback loop. Sanctions reduce Iranian revenues. Iran retaliates against Gulf infrastructure. Energy prices rise. Higher energy prices increase inflation globally. Higher inflation keeps Western interest rates elevated. Higher rates weaken economic growth and increase political pressure in the United States. The objective of economic warfare is to make time work against Tehran. Iran’s response is to make time more expensive for Washington.

This is why the next six months could be more dangerous than the previous six. Economic sanctions operate slowly. Companies withdraw gradually. Payment channels close. Inventories decline. Foreign-exchange shortages intensify. The political impact takes time. Markets operate immediately. A missile hitting an oil terminal can add a geopolitical premium within minutes. That creates a fundamental asymmetry in Trump’s strategy. Washington may need months before economic pressure forces meaningful concessions. Iran needs only hours to change the price of oil. There is also a regional political constraint. Gulf governments want Iran contained, but they do not want their economies transformed into the battlefield through which containment is achieved. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have spent years building themselves as financial, logistics and investment centres. Persistent attacks on ports, shipping, and energy infrastructure directly threaten that model.

The harder Washington squeezes Tehran, the more important Gulf cooperation becomes. But the harder Tehran retaliates against the Gulf, the more expensive that cooperation becomes for America’s partners. This does not mean Trump should abandon economic pressure. Iran’s deteriorating economy clearly represents one of Washington’s strongest sources of leverage. Military escalation alone has failed to produce a settlement, while indefinite war carries enormous economic and political costs. But the assumption that economic warfare is necessarily the safer alternative is questionable. It may reduce the probability of another massive American bombing campaign while increasing the probability of smaller, repeated Iranian attacks across the region. Less war in Iran. More instability around Iran. That may ultimately be the real strategic trade-off. Trump is betting that Iran will break before the economic pressure becomes intolerable. Tehran is betting that it can make the Gulf break first. And the closer Iran comes to economic exhaustion, the more dangerous that second bet becomes.