00:00The Trump administration is preparing to unveil its campaign to economically isolate Iran on Monday.
00:06Treasury Secretary Scott Besant is promising what he calls the most coordinated pressure effort yet.
00:13And the strategy could extend beyond Tehran to countries that continue trading with it.
00:17That would put China as the biggest buyer of Iranian oil at the center of the next phase of the
00:23conflict.
00:24For more on this story, we're now, of course, joined by Stuart Livingstone-Wallace, Lundberg's executive editor for the Middle
00:30East, North Africa and Russia.
00:33Good morning, Stuart.
00:34Scott Besant saying yesterday that this plan will be announced Monday, the economic isolation plan.
00:40What more can the U.S. do to isolate Iran? It is the most sanctioned country already.
00:46It is. I mean, at this stage, I think it's sort of they've run out of road with Iran.
00:50But what they can go after is the trading partners. But that's a much tougher proposition.
00:54As you said in your introduction there, China is the biggest buyer of Iranian oil.
00:58Do they really have enough leverage over China to force it to stop buying that oil?
01:03And I think the answer to that would be it's quite unlikely.
01:06What exactly can the Trump administration offer China in order to get it to stop buying Iranian oil?
01:11It's very hard to see that there's much leverage there.
01:13Then you have the smaller trading partners. You've already seen the UAE say it's going to cut off ties.
01:19And then after that, it comes down to sort of a whack-a-mole type strategy of going after the
01:23shadow banking, the intermediaries and so on.
01:25They're not necessarily state-backed. You know, these are individuals.
01:28So you have to go after them. But it's been doing that for years with some effect.
01:32But that will take time. And one thing you can say about the Trump administration is it's not really famous
01:37for its patience.
01:39And arguably, one would say that the U.S. had already sanctioned some independent refineries in China at the start
01:45of all of this.
01:46But then the broader picture is probably going to be more difficult to hold.
01:50But then, Stuart, I keep asking you this question.
01:52But it is the most important question to what we're seeing on Brent crude prices.
01:55The state of traffic in Hormuz, has anything at all changed over the past few days?
02:01No. There's no evidence of that.
02:02Now, as I always say, most of them have their transponders shut off.
02:06So it's very hard to have day-to-day visibility.
02:09We know that there is quite a lot of volume going through, mostly under U.S. direction.
02:14That's, we presume, through that southern route.
02:17We think there's almost nothing coming through on the Iranian side.
02:20And that blockade does seem to be quite effective.
02:22I mean, the Iranians themselves said their exports are basically down to zero.
02:26So that's the state of play.
02:27But that's been the state of the play now for weeks.
02:29Thanks.
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