SAEDNEWS: While the US says it plans to intensify economic pressure on Iran, experts argue that such measures are unlikely to alter Iran’s policies in the way Washington hopes.
According to Saed News, citing Fars News, U.S. President Donald Trump has said that he will launch an intensified campaign of economic pressure against Iran, referring to it as an “Economic D-Day.”
D-Day is a U.S. military term generally associated with the beginning of a major offensive operation during wartime. Trump has adopted the term after what the report describes as six months of military failure against Iran.
However, CNN reported Tuesday that experts believe Iran’s considerable resilience and its experience confronting nearly 47 years of various international sanctions mean that, rather than surrendering to Trump’s new measures, Tehran is more likely to escalate tensions.
Danny Citrinowicz, former head of the Iran branch of Israeli military intelligence, wrote on X that the United States had gone to war with Iran without adequately understanding the country it was confronting. He warned that the latest economic measures might not produce the desired outcome.
“If Washington still believes that sufficient economic pressure will eventually cause Iran to behave like a government willing to surrender under pressure, this is no longer simply a bad prediction; it is a fundamental failure to understand the adversary,” he said.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, similarly wrote that the measures could increase pressure on ordinary Iranians, but added that turning economic hardship into a change in government policy has historically been a different matter. He said the United States has “almost never” succeeded in doing so.
Parsi argued that this reflects the same miscalculation Trump made at the beginning of the war: the belief that greater pressure would force Tehran to surrender. That expectation did not materialize, and Parsi suggested that the so-called “Economic D-Day” sanctions are likely to produce a similar result.
After failing to defeat Iran militarily, the United States announced a shift toward economic pressure, saying it intends to launch a broad economic campaign against Tehran.
However, various analysts have pointed to Iran’s decades-long ability to withstand sanctions and stressed that repeating the same strategy is unlikely to enable Washington to achieve its objectives toward Iran.
Susan Maloney, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, also criticized U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s description of the planned measures as an “unprecedented” economic campaign. In a post on X, she characterized the launch of what Bessent called an Economic D-Day as largely political theater and publicity.
Maloney further argued that, despite Washington’s claims, the Trump administration has no clear practical plan to address the enormous damage allegedly inflicted on U.S. national security interests and those of its Gulf allies as a result of what she described as the president’s “disastrous war with Iran.”
