U.S. Sanctions on Iran Take a New Approach || Peter Zeihan

The U.S. Treasury Department has implemented aggressive new secondary sanctions targeting Iranian civil aviation, effectively barring any global entity providing ground or technical support to Iranian aircraft from the U.S. dollar system. These measures shift strategy away from regime pressure toward intentional hardship for the Iranian population to incite internal rebellion. However, the Iranian government’s massive internal security apparatus, designed specifically to suppress its ethnically diverse population, makes a successful uprising unlikely. This geopolitical tension is further complicated by an upcoming summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. Both leaders operate with severely degraded institutional intelligence—Trump due to gutted administrative departments and Xi due to long-term political purges—creating a high-stakes negotiation where both parties lack the necessary data to address complex issues like Iranian trade or Chinese manufacturing of drone components.