9 mins agoIranian official calls Trump’s economic crackdown a ‘return to full-scale classic colonialism’
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei called the Trump administration’s planned strategy to get the entire world to cut off Tehran economically a “return to full-scale classic colonialism.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the plan Thursday as “the greatest coordinated economic isolation in the history of the world.”
“If you insist on doing business with them, either transferring money, buying their oil, or doing seaborne ship transfers, then the U.S. Treasury and the U.S. government will put its full might and force toward enforcing against you,” Bessent added.
Baqaei denounced this, saying in a Friday social media post: “No State may lawfully compel foreign banks, enterprises, or airports – each subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of its own sovereign – to renounce lawful commerce with a third State.”
“Such secondary sanctions find no foundation in international law,” Baqaei added. “When combined with a naval blockade amounting to military aggression, these demands reduce the sovereignty of all other States to something provisional, conditional, and revocable at the whim of another power.”
“The end result would be the complete erosion of sovereignty as the foundational basis of the UN-based inter-State system, and a recipe for an abysmal return to full-scale classic colonialism,” he concluded.