U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, formerly of the Soros Fund Management, smugly assured Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on Jan. 20, that U.S. sanctions have “worked” in bringing the Iranian nation and people to their knees. Multiple nations around the world have been subjected to such U.S. economic embargos, killing by economic means as many as in a shooting war, in many cases. This is what Bessent calls “economic statecraft.”
When Bartiromo asked him if sanctions actually work, citing the case of Iran and the mooted 500% sanctions on countries that trade with Russia and China, Bessent bragged:
“If you look at a speech that I gave at the Economic Club of New York last March, I said that I believe the Iranian currency was on the verge of collapse, that if I were an Iranian citizen, I would take my money out.
“President Trump ordered Treasury and our OFAC division, Office of Foreign Asset Control, to put maximum pressure on Iran. And it’s worked, because in December, their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under. The central bank has started to print money. There is a dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports. And this is why the people took to the street.”
“This is economic statecraft,” he asserted. “No shots fired. And things are moving in a very positive way here.”
Judge Napolitano appropriately exclaimed, after showing that clip in an interview with Glenn Diesen the next day, “Economic statecraft? People died due to his manipulation—followed up by the CIA and MI6, and Mossad giving rifles to thugs to shoot and kill innocents ... and it failed,” Judge Napolitano added.
As for increased sanctions against Russia and China, Bessent left that as an open question. To hear him tell it, India stopped buying Russian oil after President Trump slapped a 25% tariff on New Delhi for doing so. China, he said, “is a very large buyer of Russian oil as they are of Iranian oil, as they were of Venezuelan oil. But guess what, Maria, no more Venezuelan oil for them.”
Bessent is an all-round shameless thug. In his Jan. 22 press conference at the USA House in Davos, he dissed California Governor Gavin Newsom for being in Davos “with his billionaire sugar daddy, Alex Soros.” How rich! Bessent’s career was made working for George Soros, the “daddy” of Newsom’s “sugar daddy.” Bessent was a managing partner of the Soros Fund’s London office from 1991-2000; left for a stint to other hedge funds; but returned to Soros Fund Management in 2011 to serve as its Chief Investment Officer, until August 2015, when he left to start his own hedge fund—aided by a $2 billion boost from Soros’s funds.
Despite all that help, poor old Bessent is still no more than a half-billionaire, with a stated net worth of $521 million.
