reportedly<\/a> been in talks with Iran about charging vessels transiting the key oil shipping route \u2014 not to allow a tolling system in the waterway.<\/p>\n“Oman, in particular, should know that the U.S. Treasury will aggressively target any actors involved \u2014 directly or indirectly \u2014 in facilitating tolls for the Strait and any willing partners will be penalized,” Bessent wrote in an X post Thursday morning.<\/p>\n
The post came one day after Trump, while insisting at a Cabinet meeting that the strait must remain unobstructed, said that “Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow ’em up.”<\/p>\n
Bessent, during Thursday’s press briefing, said Oman’s ambassador had assured him in a phone call that morning that “there were no plans for tolling the strait.”<\/p>\n
Read more CNBC politics coverage<\/p>\n
The sanctions announced Wednesday are part of “Operation Economic Fury,” the Trump administration’s effort to squeeze Tehran’s finances that U.S. officials say has supplanted its military campaign dubbed “Operation Epic Fury.”<\/p>\n
“Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA) is a joke, and today Treasury has sanctioned it,” Bessent said on X Thursday morning prior to his post calling out Oman. “We have warned any corporate or state entities against paying tolls or hiding them as aid payments.”<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Iran and the U.S. continue to use force in the strait, further eroding their shaky ceasefire that is nominally still in effect.<\/p>\n
Iran on Wednesday night “launched a ballistic missile toward Kuwait that was successfully intercepted by Kuwaiti forces,” U.S. Central Command said Thursday morning, calling the action an “egregious ceasefire violation.”<\/p>\n
The attack took place “hours after Iranian forces launched five one-way attack drones that posed a clear threat in and near the Strait of Hormuz,” CENTCOM said in an X post. “All drones were successfully intercepted by U.S. forces which also prevented a sixth drone launch from an Iranian ground control site in Bandar Abbas.”<\/p>\n
The latest military and economic actions followed Trump’s insistence Wednesday that he feels no pressure to make a deal with Iran before the midterm elections more than five months away.<\/p>\n
“They’re getting clobbered. Their economy is in free fall,” Trump said of Iran during a Cabinet meeting.<\/p>\n
“They thought they were going to outwait me, you know. ‘We’ll outwait him, he’s got the midterms.’ I don’t care about the midterms,” Trump said.<\/p>\n
This is developing news. Please check back for updates.<\/p>\n
Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465679,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[151246,199379,6419,357,4406,6420,54,1675,4410,2973,2784,42,87,43,2595,238,2635,3336,40,38,41,39,1032],"class_list":["post-465678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-lco26n","tag-lco26v","tag-breaking-news-politics","tag-business-news","tag-defense","tag-donald-j-trump","tag-donald-trump","tag-economic-events","tag-elections","tag-foreign-policy","tag-government-debt","tag-headlines","tag-iran","tag-news","tag-oman","tag-politics","tag-scott-bessent","tag-tehran","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465678\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}