By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2025-03-10 04:34:29 | Updated at 2025-03-10 09:24:08
7 hours ago
“Making Iran Broke Again” has a nice ring to it.
After four years of shady appeasement by the Biden administration, Iran’s bloodthirsty regime is under pressure again — and just in the nick of time, before it finesses its nuclear weapons capability.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hammered Iran in his speech to the Economic Club of New York last week, foreshadowing harsh new sanctions and a long-overdue crackdown on the Islamist regime’s black-market oil economy.
Iran’s sanctions fraud was a dirty little not-so-secret of the Biden administration, known to intelligence agencies and hedge fund traders alike.
“Iran has developed a complex shadow network of financial facilitators and black-market oil shippers via a ghost fleet to sell oil, petrochemical and other commodities to finance its exports and generate hard currency,” said Bessent.
When Donald Trump left office in 2021, Iran was on its knees.
Savage sanctions aimed at strangling Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and funding of terrorists had reduced Iran’s oil exports to a trickle. Trump had also torn up the diabolical Iran nuclear deal, the Obama administration’s so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Weak on mullahs
Under Joe Biden, everything changed. He eased off on sanctions enforcement, betrayed Iranian dissidents, re-animated the nuclear deal and returned $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets in September 2023, a month before the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Biden and his handlers were so fixated on winning re-election that nothing mattered except maintaining high global oil supplies so they could keep a lid on soaring US gas prices that were helping fuel inflation.
So, as Bessent points out with contempt, the Biden administration, for base political reasons, turned a blind eye to the black market in co-mingled oil that continued to enrich Iran, whose exports went from a low of 100,000 barrels per day at the end of Trump’s first term to more than 1.7 million barrels a day under Biden.
This allowed the mullahs to fund their terrorist proxies to attack Israel and target US troops — such as the drone strike on Erbil Air Base in December 2023 that critically injured an American service member — and to strike global shipping in the Red Sea.
Iran also used the Biden largesse to supply Russia’s war machine in Ukraine with attack drones and ammunition, while advancing its own nuclear weapons program that endangers the world.
No more, says Bessent: “We are going to shut down Iran’s oil sector and drone manufacturing capabilities.”
Big international oil traders such as the private, Dubai-based Kasco Group now are under investigation by the Trump administration for facilitating Iran’s oil trade using complex financial arrangements to evade US restrictions.
“Intelligence Community sources [have] detailed intelligence on how Iran is averting sanctions and illegally selling their oil in the West, using cutouts,” says former National Security Agency intelligence analyst John Schindler. “This intelligence fingers Kasco as one of the main culprits in this lucrative scam.”
The large-scale oil fraud has been well known to the intelligence community for years, according to Schindler.
“The Biden administration was briefed, but they did nothing,” he said.
Main customer: China
China, Iran’s main oil customer, is the architect of Iran’s “shadow financial channels which run from its oil rigs to the virtual vaults of its central bank,” the Economist reported last year in an investigation titled “Iran’s Secret Oil Trade.”
The way it works is that about 100 front companies buy old tankers flagged in Panama, rename them, switch off their transponders or lend them to another ship so they can’t be tracked and sail to one of Iran’s export terminals to pick up the oil.
The oil cargo is then usually transferred to another ship in Iraq or Oman or off the coast of Malaysia or Singapore, after which it heads to China.
The oil is mislabeled as Iraqi, Malaysian, Omani, or from some other legitimate source, according to The Economist.
It can be blended with legitimate oil to further disguise its chemical fingerprint and sell it on global markets.
But market sources say the unique sulfur level of Iranian oil is a dead giveaway — if anyone had cared to check.
China gets a great deal because it pays Iran 30% to 50% less for its oil than it would pay on the legitimate market.
Biden apologists, such as his long-time energy czar Amos Hochstein (who famously met with Hunter Biden in 2015 to discuss the then-vice president’s son’s lucrative involvement with the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma), have argued that sanctions work well enough without being properly enforced because they reduce the revenue countries like Iran and Russia can earn without hurting global oil supply.
“Our ultimate policy is I have to have enough oil on the market as long as I have the demand there and to make sure that the economy works,” Hochstein told Bloomberg last year in a discussion about sanctions enforcement on Iran and Russia.
But as The Economist points out, the problem with Biden’s lax enforcement in Iran is that the burden is placed on Iranian households, who face 35% inflation, while China and the mullahs get rich.
‘Maximum pressure’
Last month, the Trump White House announced a “maximum pressure campaign” on Iran designed to collapse its already buckling economy.
“We will close off Iran’s access to the international financial system by targeting regional parties that facilitate the transfer of its revenues,” says Bessent.
“We are going to shut down Iran’s oil sector and drone manufacturing capabilities,” he said. “If economic security is national security, the regime in Tehran will have neither.”
In a good cop-bad cop move coinciding with Bessent’s harsh speech Thursday, President Trump sent Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei a letter politely suggesting he negotiate a deal or face military action.
“We have to do something because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday.
The ayatollah reportedly has rejected the overture, ironically criticizing Trump as a “bully.”
Iran is just one of the unholy messes Biden has left for Trump to fix. Godspeed.
