WASHINGTON — For years, the Gulf states told Washington what Washington wanted to hear. That changed, Scott Bessent told senators on Wednesday, the moment US and Israeli strikes began landing on Iran.
The US Treasury Secretary appeared before the Senate Finance Committee as the broader Iran war — now in its third month with a ceasefire framework still unresolved — continues to reshape the political economy of the Middle East. Lawmakers pressed Bessent on the mechanics of the US financial siege on Tehran, and on how reliably American partners in the Gulf were actually enforcing it.
His answer was unusually candid. “We have good partners in the Gulf, but many of them were not completely transparent with us,” Bessent told the committee. Before the strikes on Iran, he explained, Gulf Cooperation Council states had routinely denied holding Iranian oil in their banking systems. Once the war started, the denials stopped.
The admission carries consequences that go beyond diplomatic awkwardness. Operation Economic Fury — the Treasury-led financial campaign launched April 15 to obstruct Iran’s alternate revenue streams alongside the US naval blockade — depends on partner compliance to close the loopholes that have long allowed Iranian oil to move under other flags, through other ports, and into other banking systems. If Gulf institutions were concealing Iranian exposure before the war, the architecture of maximum pressure had a structural gap running through its centre.
Bessent said the Iranian strikes on Gulf neighbors had effectively served as a forcing mechanism. Gulf states that previously claimed clean books were now more willing to disclose ties to Iranian-supplied oil and to engage with Treasury’s requests for financial intelligence. What Washington could not extract through years of diplomatic pressure, a missile strike apparently achieved in days.
He also described Iran’s attacks on its Gulf neighbors as a strategic mistake, framing them as self-defeating precisely because they drove previously reluctant partners toward closer cooperation with Washington’s sanctions campaign. The comment suggests Treasury believes the war’s disruption of Gulf-Iran financial ties has, paradoxically, improved its ability to enforce economic pressure — even as the ceasefire talks remain inconclusive.
The hearing opened against a backdrop of intensifying Treasury actions. Earlier this week, the Treasury sanctioned Nobitex, Iran’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, part of a push to cut off the digital financial channels the regime has used to route oil revenue around the dollar system. Bessent said the department would maintain maximum economic pressure regardless of the trajectory of diplomatic talks, though he acknowledged last Friday — at the Reagan National Economic Forum — that sanctions relief remained possible if negotiations produced a satisfactory outcome.
That conditional language has drawn scrutiny from both parties. Democrats on the Finance Committee have argued that earlier temporary oil waivers granted in March effectively handed Iran significant revenue during the war, a charge Bessent rejected during the hearing, disputing the figures cited and calling the claim a political talking point. Republicans, meanwhile, have pushed Treasury to go further — Senator Tom Cotton has formally asked Bessent to sanction any entity paying Iran’s newly established Persian Gulf Strait Authority, which the IRGC set up to collect tolls from vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz.
The Strait remains the pressure point neither side has been able to resolve. Washington sanctioned the Persian Gulf Strait Authority in late May, declaring the toll-collection scheme maritime extortion and warning that any vessel or institution facilitating payments faced designation. Iran’s maneuver — asserting sovereign control over the world’s most critical oil chokepoint — has forced the Gulf states into an uncomfortable middle position, one that helps explain both their earlier opacity with Treasury and their more recent willingness to cooperate.
The deadlock over the Hormuz question has persisted despite the April ceasefire and subsequent talks in Islamabad, which ended without a formal agreement. The US blockade of Iranian ports, imposed April 13, remains in effect. A tentative 60-day ceasefire framework has been discussed but not signed, and Trump has yet to formally endorse the terms.
What Bessent’s testimony surfaces is a problem that will outlast any ceasefire agreement: the sanctions architecture that Washington spent years building was, by his own account, leaking through the institutions of its closest regional partners. Plugging those leaks required a war. Whether the war has plugged them permanently, or merely redirected the flows, is a question the Treasury Department’s own data cannot yet answer.
—Inputs from RIA Novosti, Sputnik.
