Bessent: Iran’s Last Oil Cargoes to China Run Out in Two Weeks

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that Iran will finish delivering the last barrels of oil still at sea to China within about two weeks and then have “nothing left to trade for anything.” He spoke on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” with Larry Kudlow. The same assessment circulated Monday in conservative outlets covering the interview.

“I am confident, given that there’s only 15 million more barrels of Iranian oil on the water, that Iran will have nothing left to trade for anything,” Bessent said. “Probably within the next two weeks, they are going to make their final deliveries of oil to China, and then they will have nothing. It is an empty set. And I believe that they are feeling the pressure here, and that’s why they want a deal.” He rejected the idea that China is still providing a meaningful cash pipeline. “China has substantially reduced any assistance to Iran,” he said.

The claim sits inside Operation Economic Outcast, the Treasury campaign launched Aug. 24 to cut Iran off from oil smuggling, banking, digital assets, gold, aviation, and shipping. OFAC designated more than 60 entities, people, and vessels on day one. Secondary sanctions have since hit facilitators in the UAE, Turkey, and Hong Kong. The European Union later joined the effort. Bessent has described the package as the tightest economic isolation applied to a single government. A naval blockade of Iranian ports — what President Trump has called a “wall of steel” — is meant to stop new loadings. Cargo already at sea is what Bessent said is now winding down.

On Hormuz, Bessent said the waterway is already functioning for non-Iranian oil. “The straits are open,” he told Kudlow. “We’re averaging now 15 to 22 million barrels a day. It was at about 20 pre-conflict.” He put the score this way: more than one billion barrels have moved past U.S. forces; Iranian loadings, he said, are zero under the blockade. CENTCOM has separately said large volumes of oil have transited the Gulf during the conflict. Independent tanker-tracking firms have at times shown lower Hormuz flows and “dark” Iranian ships; Bessent’s figures are the administration’s operational count.

He tied the squeeze to any future agreement. Iran did not keep the earlier memorandum of understanding, he said. “They are a pariah state. And my job is to make sure that, when they come with a deal, that they want to stick to it.” A next deal, he added, is “at President Trump’s discretion,” and Tehran would keep it “because they are on their knees.” He said the rial has collapsed from about 800,000 to the dollar when maximum pressure resumed in 2025 to roughly 2.4 million now. Iran holds some of the world’s largest energy reserves but imports gasoline; U.S. officials have pointed to fuel lines and trouble paying the military as signs of strain.

Iranian officials said Sunday they were waiting on a U.S. answer to a ceasefire proposal that would open the strait in seven days. Trump publicly rejected that offer Saturday, saying Tehran wants the strait open because it is “losing so badly” and “dying” without oil revenue. U.S. officials said the Iranian terms included release of about $12 billion in frozen assets, an end to oil sanctions, and lifting the port blockade. Bessent did not treat those conditions as the basis for talks. He said any agreement that follows will be written against a government that no longer has oil left to sell.