Scott Bessent published a list Sunday night, and the striking thing about this list is who is on it. Countries that buy or transport Iranian petroleum. Exchange houses. Free trade zones. Airports that handle Iranian flights. Ship registries. Firms that enable seaborne fuel transfers. Every one of those sits outside Iran. The campaign the Treasury Secretary opened Monday morning runs, by design, through people who are not at war with anybody. Catholic social doctrine has more to say about this sort of a list than most of us have ever heard.

The News Story

The United States on Monday began what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has called an “economic D-Day” against Iran, a sanctions campaign the administration describes as the largest financial offensive ever directed at a single adversary. Bessent was scheduled to hold a news conference at 2 p.m. Eastern time (7 p.m. Central European) to set out the specific measures, which had not been published as of Monday morning.

Bessent announced the campaign late Sunday in a post on X and in an opinion article in the Financial Times. “At dawn begins an economic D-Day, the single greatest financial offensive ever marshaled against an adversary,” he wrote. He said President Donald Trump’s military campaign had “significantly dismantled Iran’s military capabilities and weakened its nuclear program,” that the administration was “entering the endgame,” and that the aim was to “sever every economic lifeline that sustains the tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone.” In remarks last week, Bessent said the plan amounted to “the greatest coordinated economic isolation in the history of the world,” adding, “We have the blockade, and we are going to have the toughest sanctions in history… we are going to collapse this regime.” Trump wrote on Truth Social last week that the operation would be “the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country.”

According to Bessent’s own outline, the package is expected to rest on secondary sanctions, penalties aimed at third-country governments, banks and firms that keep dealing with Tehran rather than at Iranian entities themselves. He warned that nations and companies that buy or transport Iranian petroleum, move money through exchange houses and free-trade zones, handle Iranian flights, maintain ship registries or enable ship-to-ship fuel transfers would “share in its isolation.” The measures would be layered on top of the U.S. naval blockade already in place.

The escalation follows the expiry of a 60-day window set by the memorandum of understanding that Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed on June 17, which suspended the blockade and provided free passage for commercial vessels. No agreement was reached before the deadline lapsed on August 18, closing the formal truce mechanism in a war now in its sixth month.

Iran rejected the campaign. Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said that “if the economic war continues, not a single drop of oil will be exported, neither through the Strait of Hormuz nor from anywhere in the Persian Gulf,” and threatened to halt all traffic through the waterway if neighboring states joined the U.S. effort. Iran’s state-controlled Persian Gulf Strait Authority warned that vessels violating its transit rules could face “fines, seizure, or confiscation.” Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei called secondary sanctions an “assertion of extraterritorial sovereignty over every independent member state of the United Nations” that “find no foundation in international law,” and elsewhere described the strategy as “a return to full-scale classic colonialism.”

Oil prices eased Monday despite the rhetoric. Brent crude traded near $91.50, about 2 percent below Friday’s close, and West Texas Intermediate near $86.20, down roughly 1.5 percent. Shipping data cited by Axios showed about 40 tankers moving some 16 million barrels through the strait’s southern channel Friday night, above the 15 to 20 vessels recorded on preceding nights, though volumes remain well below pre-conflict levels. China, which buys an estimated 90 percent of Iran’s exports, took about 534,000 barrels per day in August, against a 2025 average of 1.4 million.^[1]

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

The Woman Behind The Counter

Picture a currency exchange office in Dubai, Istanbul, or Kuala Lumpur. A woman counts out notes across a glass counter, six days a week, under a license issued by a government that never asked to be part of anyone’s Middle East policy. She did not attend the June 17 talks. She had no say when the 60-day window ran out on August 18. And this week she learns that Washington has classified her line of work as a “financial artery” and that she may be made to “share in its isolation.”

Multiply her by the ship registrars in Panama, the port clerks in Shandong, the airline ground crews in Baku, and the small correspondent banks that clear payments in a dozen countries. The campaign that opened Monday is aimed at Tehran, but it uses all of them as its means to get at Tehran. That structure is what the Church’s social doctrine speaks to with great directness.

What The Church Means By A Community Of Nations

Start with how the Church describes the world. The Compendium teaches that the international community is a juridical community founded on the sovereignty of each member State, “without bonds of subordination that deny or limit its independence.”^[2] That sentence rules out a great deal. Malaysia stands toward the United States as an equal in dignity and in law, and Panama’s decisions about its own ship registry belong, as a matter of justice, to Panama. The Church’s picture of the world has no parent company in it.

John XXIII put the same principle in plainer language sixty-three years ago, and Pacem in Terris remains the fullest treatment the Magisterium has given to how nations should deal with each other. Relations between States, he wrote, must be regulated by freedom, which means “no country has the right to take any action that would constitute an unjust oppression of other countries, or an unwarranted interference in their affairs.”^[3] He went further in a passage that reads uncomfortably against this week’s headlines: “just as individual men may not pursue their own private interests in a way that is unfair and detrimental to others, so too it would be criminal in a State to aim at improving itself by the use of methods which involve other nations in injury and unjust oppression.”^[4] And then he quoted Saint Augustine, who asked what kingdoms are, once justice is taken away, if not “mighty bands of robbers.”^[5]

That is a difficult passage, and I want to be careful with it. John XXIII is describing a method. He leaves plenty of room for legitimate economic pressure: a nation may lawfully decline to trade, and it may refuse its own banks to a hostile power. What the passage puts under judgment is the deliberate use of a third nation’s injury as the lever by which you improve your own position.

Even The Threat Is Weighed

Here is the part most readers will not have encountered. The Compendium notes that the Charter of the United Nations does more than ban recourse to force: “it rejects even the threat to use force.”^[6] The Church picks that up and treats it with moral seriousness, because a threat is already an exercise of power over the person threatened. The Malaysian banker who quietly closes an Iranian account this week, before any designation ever lands, has already been governed by a foreign state. The threat alone did the work, at zero cost to the government that made it, which is exactly what it was intended to do.

Some Catholics will answer that economic measures are not force at all, that nobody is shot and no border is crossed. That answer is thinner than it sounds. Bessent himself borrowed the language of the Normandy landings and told an interviewer the goal is to “collapse this regime.” When a government describes its own program in the vocabulary of war and names regime collapse as the objective, we should take it at its word and weigh it as we would weigh war.

In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV argues that the classical Just War framework is outdated and can no longer carry the weight Catholic moral analysis has traditionally placed on it.^[7] Previously, we would run down a checklist of conditions and, once the boxes were ticked, declare the matter settled. Leo XIV asks something harder. He asks whether a campaign can be reconciled with the unity of the human family at all. The Compendium says that unity “is not to be built on the force of arms, terror or abuse of power.”^[8] A campaign whose method is to make sixty countries afraid does not meet that description.

The Trap On The Other Side

Fairness cuts both ways here, and the Church’s principles do not exempt Tehran. Mohsen Rezaei’s threat to stop “a single drop of oil” from leaving the Persian Gulf, and the warning that vessels may face “fines, seizure, or confiscation,” are aimed at exactly the same bystanders. A Filipino deck officer on a Greek-owned tanker under a Liberian flag is not a party to this war either, and threatening to seize his ship in order to punish Washington falls under the identical judgment. Pacem in Terris says that when interests clash, the differences “must be settled in a truly human way, not by armed force nor by deceit or trickery,” through a mature assessment of both sides and an equitable reconciliation of opposing views.^[9] Both capitals have now chosen the other road, and both are reaching for the same hostage.

What A Catholic Does With This

Very little of this is in our hands, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the doctrine still asks something concrete of us.

It asks us to refuse the sorting. The whole logic of a secondary sanction is that the world divides into two columns and everyone must be entered in one. John XXIII wrote that no State can properly pursue its own interests in isolation from the rest, because the prosperity of any one nation is partly cause and partly consequence of the prosperity of all the others.^[10] Catholics hold that as a hard description of how the world is actually built. A campaign that succeeds by making a Turkish exchange house, an Emirati shipper, and a Chinese refiner each choose a side is working against the grain of what the human family actually is.

It asks us to keep the invisible people visible. Our prayers this week can hold the Iranian family whose currency is collapsing, and they can also hold the clerk in Baku and the sailor off Fujairah, who will never appear in a headline and whose livelihoods are being spent as bargaining chips in a quarrel that was never theirs.

And it asks us to want an end to this, which means wanting the talks back. The 60-day window closed on August 18, and nothing has replaced it. The Compendium calls the international community to renounce every desire to manipulate the institutions that exist solely for the common good.^[11] Those institutions are shabby and slow and frequently useless. They are also the only place where this ends without somebody’s ships burning. Praying for their success is what the Church has asked of us since 1963, and the alternative to their success is sitting on the wires this morning, priced in dollars a barrel.

---

This story turns on the juridical equality of nations: no state may make a bystander pay for another state’s war.

One principle from the Church’s social teaching, applied to the week’s news, in your inbox each Saturday.

Get it by email

---

Footnotes

1. Quirino Mealha, “US Threatens Iran with ‘Economic D-Day’ as Markets Await Sanctions Announcement,” Euronews, August 24, 2026, https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/08/24/us-threatens-iran-with-economic-d-day-as-markets-await-sanctions-announcement; “Iran Warns of Hormuz Ship Seizures ahead of Bessent’s Planned Sanctions Push,” CNBC, August 24, 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/24/us-iran-war-trump-hormuz-bessent-economic-sanctions-.html; “Treasury Secretary to Announce Iran Sanctions as Tehran Dismisses Economic Warfare Threat,” CNBC, August 23, 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/23/treasury-secretary-bessent-iran-sanctions-press-conference.html; “Bessent Promises ‘Economic D-Day’ ahead of Expected Iran Sanctions,” CNN, August 23, 2026, https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/23/world/live-news/iran-war-trump; “U.S., Iran Keep Up Hostile Rhetoric ahead of New Sanctions,” NBC News, August 23, 2026, https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/us-iran-keep-hostile-rhetoric-ahead-new-sanctions-rcna593870; “Trump Vows Unprecedented Iran Sanctions after Deal Deadline Passes,” Fox News, August 2026, https://www.foxnews.com/world/iran-deal-clock-hits-zero-trump-demands-white-flag-new-pressure-campaign-looming; “Trump Says Iran Could Be Bombed ‘a Little Bit More’ as US Shifts to Economic Crackdown,” Fox News, August 22, 2026, https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/trump-iran-war-sanctions-economic-crackdown-08-22-26; Reuters, “US Vows ‘Economic D-Day’ as Iran Threatens to Halt All Oil Exports,” U.S. News & World Report, August 23, 2026, https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2026-08-23/us-vows-economic-d-day-as-iran-threatens-to-halt-all-oil-exports; “Iran Denounces Planned US Sanctions as Economic Warfare,” Straight Arrow News, August 2026, https://san.com/cc/iran-denounces-planned-us-sanctions-as-economic-warfare/. ↩
2. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 434. ↩
3. John XXIII, Encyclical Letter Pacem in Terris (April 11, 1963), no. 120. ↩
4. John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, no. 92. ↩
5. Augustine, De Civitate Dei IV, 4, quoted in John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, no. 92. ↩
6. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 438. ↩
7. Leo XIV, Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas (May 25, 2026), discussed in Aleja Hertzler-McCain and Jack Jenkins, “Pope Leo Calls Just War Theory ‘Outdated’ in New Encyclical,” Religion News Service, May 25, 2026, https://religionnews.com/2026/05/25/in-new-encyclical-pope-leo-calls-on-catholics-to-move-beyond-just-war-theory/. ↩
8. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 432. ↩
9. John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, no. 93. ↩
10. John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, no. 131. ↩
11. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 442. ↩