‘Tremendous costs’: Can Trump stop other countries from trading with Iran?

EXPLAINERIran’s foreign minister has dismissed Trump’s latest threats, calling them a “diversion” from America’s own crisis.”Iranians walk in front of an anti-Trump billboard in Tehran, Iran, [File: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA]Published On 20 Aug 2026US President Donald Trump has announced what he describes as the “most crushing economic operation” against Iran, as Washington ramps up pressure on Tehran and talks to end the war between the two countries continue to stall.In a post on Truth Social on Wednesday, Trump said Iran had “failed to take” the opportunity to make a deal, and would face “Economic Warfare and isolation on an unprecedented scale”.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemslist 1 of 3USS Lincoln woes highlight US Navy limits in prolonged Iran war: Expertslist 2 of 3Trump threatens ‘tremendous’ costs for countries trading with Iranlist 3 of 3Publisher of US military newspaper resigns over differences with governmentend of listHe also threatened Sanctions against any country that does business with Iran.“ANY country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences,” he wrote. “Oil smuggling, swap lines, cash transfers, exchange houses, ship registries, front companies – it all needs to stop NOW. You know who you are. This will be an ECONOMIC D-DAY, and we need all of our Allies to stand with the United States of America to isolate, and defeat, the Iran threat.”Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi dismissed Trump’s latest threats of economic Sanctions, calling it a “diversion from America’s own crisis: unprecedented debt & surging interest costs”.“Doubling down on failed policies will only bring further defeat – and enmity of Iranians. US economic terrorism threatens global economy and sovereignty worldwide,” he wrote on X.Iran’s state media outlets also dismissed Trump’s announcement as nothing new.The IRIB state broadcaster said the US president’s comments followed “the failure of military aggression” while the semi-official Tasnim News Agency said the announcement was “not a new development”. It added that the US “has been trying for years to block any financial and economic ties with Iran” but that Tehran has “learned how to circumvent these restrictions and has become very skilled at doing so”.On Wednesday, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced an indefinite Trade Embargo on Iran, accusing Iranian forces of firing two ballistic missiles at its territory this week. Iran denied the claims.Also this week, Tajikistan and Iran finalised an agreement which would enable Tehran to export oil to Dushanbe.So can Trump actually stop other countries from trading with Iran?Here’s what we know:What does Iran trade and who are its partners?Iran is a member of the OPEC oil producers group and oil is its major export.Before the war, Tehran exported roughly 1.3 million to 1.5 million barrels of crude oil per day, earning about $115m a day – or $3.45bn per month – in early February. In May, crude oil exports fell to their lowest level in at least six years, at below 300,000bpd, with the ongoing US naval blockade on Iranian ports squeezing Tehran’s most important source of income.The US has also reimposed Sanctions on Iranian oil, the Department of the Treasury announced Tuesday.During the war, Trump temporarily waived Sanctions on oil cargoes already at sea to ease the energy crisis arising from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The US granted Iran a 60-day full waiver, allowing Tehran to sell crude oil amid the ongoing peace talks as part of the June Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the US and Iran that expired on August 21.On Wednesday, Iran’s Central Bank Governor Abdolnaser Hemmati said the country’s oil exports have fallen amid the war and Sanctions, but that authorities had prepared for revenue losses.Non-oil exports between the start of Iran’s fiscal year on March 21 and August 16 reached nearly $15bn, while imports were $17bn, Iranian media reported, citing an official from Iran’s Customs Administration.The official added that trade has declined 24 percent from a year ago.Last year, from March 2025 to January 2026, Iran’s total non-oil trade was $94 billion.Some of Iran’s top trading partners include the UAE, China, India, Turkiye and Germany, according to the World Bank’s latest data on the country. The UAE, however, announced an indefinite Trade Embargo with Iran this week.Frederic Schneider, a nonresident senior fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, said Washington has thrown everything at Iran, with a “maximum pressure” order to drive Iranian oil exports to zero through 14 Sanctions packages, and a 25 percent-tariff on any country doing business with Tehran.Alone, US Sanctions on Iran have not always been particularly effective, analysts say.In the past, “Iran’s crude exports hit record highs, around 1.7 million barrels a day, with China taking the overwhelming majority. Sanctions do raise the cost of trading with Iran, but they cannot end it,” Schneider told Al Jazeera.“China has barred its own firms from complying with US Sanctions in May, the first time it has invoked that blocking law. Turkiye and Pakistan keep trading too. Turkiye’s posture since 2018 has been that it will not join American Sanctions against Iran. Then there is the UAE, with a new embargo, so this will definitely have a detrimental effect,” he said.“Finally, since much of Emirati trade has collapsed due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, material cargo flows seem rather irrelevant right now, and financial flows are difficult to monitor,” he added.Here’s what Iran’s trade with some of its partners looks like:ChinaChina is believed to be Iran’s largest trading partner with total bilateral trade estimated at between $10bn and $41bn annually. It is difficult to verify the exact figure as Iran trade is not shared in official Chinese data due to Western Sanctions.According to oil analytics firm Kpler, oil is a major Chinese import. In 2025, it is believed that Beijing bought more than 80 percent of Iran’s shipped oil, mostly via shadow fleets which evade US Sanctions by switching off tracking devices and using false flags.IraqBefore the war began at the end of February, Iran was exporting $12bn worth of goods and services to Iraq annually, including $4bn of goods direct to the Iraqi government, such as gas and electricity, and $8bn to the private sector, according to Hemmati.Iraq has pledged to address outstanding payments owed to Iran, Hemmati said, while noting that Baghdad is itself facing difficulties due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and disruptions to its own oil revenues.IndiaIndia is also one of Iran’s key trading partners. Its total bilateral trade with Iran stood at around $1.6bn in 2025, according to India’s commerce ministry. Major Indian exports to Iran include basmati rice, fruits, vegetables, drugs and other pharmaceutical products. Iran’s exports include dry fruits, nuts, organic chemicals, minerals and petrochemicals.New Delhi, however, stopped importing oil from Iran in 2019 after the US imposed new Sanctions on Iranian oil. Trump’s latest warning could signal India will further reduce its trade with Iran, according to local media reports.United Arab EmiratesThe UAE has also been an important trading partner for Iran.According to the most recent trade data from the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC), an economic tracker, official goods traded between the UAE and Iran amounted to $6.2bn in 2023.The UAE’s exports to Iran were valued at approximately $5.8bn, with imports of about $450m worth of goods in return.That year, Iran imported telephones worth $2.81bn from the UAE. Other products imported by Iran were computers, tobacco and nuts. Iran exported nuts, fruits, spices, crustaceans and building stone to the UAE that year.In addition to formal trade between the two countries, the UAE has also long served as a vital informal trade hub for Iran, enabling Tehran to bypass global economic Sanctions.On Wednesday this week, however, the UAE announced an indefinite Trade Embargo on Iran, accusing Iranian forces of firing two ballistic missiles at its territory. Analysts say the move is significant given Iran’s heavily reliance on its neighbour for critical imports and access to financial markets.TurkiyeTurkiye’s exports to Iran were $2.3bn in 2025, while imports were $2.2bn over 11 months of the year, according to sector and official data sources. Since the start of the war, trade has declined.Speaking to Al Jazeera on August 15, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said reopening the Strait of Hormuz was a priority for Ankara.GermanyGermany is Iran’s largest trading partner in the European Union. Iranian exports to Germany stood at around 217 million euros ($253.6m) in the first 11 months of 2025, an increase of 1.7 percent on the same period for the previous year, according to data from the state-owned international economic promotion agency Germany Trade & Invest. German exports to Iran slumped by one-quarter to 871 million euros ($1.02bn) over the period, however.This year, the EU’s overall trade with Iran has fallen since the bloc imposed new Sanctions in January over serious human rights violations and Iran’s support for Russia’s war against Ukraine.RussiaEconomic relations between Iran and Russia deepened after the US withdrew from the Obama-era 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and other nations in 2018 and reimposed sweeping Sanctions on Tehran.“Trade turnover reached $4.8bn last year [2024], but we believe that the potential for our mutual trade is much greater,” Russian Energy Minister Sergey Tsivilyov told an intergovernmental commission on trade and economic cooperation between Moscow and Tehran in 2025.Since 2018, bilateral trade is reported to have increased by 16 percent, driven largely by Russian exports of grain, metals, machinery and industrial goods to Iran. Iran’s exports to Russia include agricultural goods, food products, petrochemicals and military equipment.Tehran has also supplied Russia with low-cost Shahed drones, which Russia has updated and has been using in its war on Ukraine.As trade with its key partners has fallen since the start of the war with the US, analysts say Tehran may seek to depend less on the Gulf and more on a patchwork of railways, Caspian ports and Sanctions-era trade networks linking it to Russia in the future.Can Trump coerce other countries into ending trade with Iran?Trump did not explain how he would do this and it is difficult to see what steps his administration could take beyond the Sanctions the US has already imposed on Iranian oil.Shantanu Singh, a lawyer who specialises in public international and trade law, said no country has the power to impose a total embargo on trade with Iran – or any other country – without authorisation from the UN Security Council.“What the US President is authorised to do under US law and has done in the past is to impose unilateral Sanctions that disable the use of US financial institutions for international trade with Iran,” he told Al Jazeera.Paul Musgrave, an associate professor of government at Georgetown University in Qatar, told Al Jazeera that “it is going to be very difficult” for Trump to enforce “economic consequences” on countries that do business with Iran.“Trump is trying to unilaterally assert the kind of coordinated Sanctions that traditionally has taken multilateral coordination, and that means getting on board China, Russia, the P5 of the UN Security Council,” he said, referring to the permanent members of the UNSC.Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna said Trump’s latest move showed “a degree of frustration” over the currently deadlock in the five-month-old conflict.Hanna said the announcement may look like “another shouting threat” to Iranian officials.“But perhaps his target audience is an American public that continues to oppose this ongoing conflict,” Hanna said. “He is now taking what he hopes will be seen in the public forum as a very strong stance, regardless of the fact that we do not have specific details on which to judge the possible efficacy of this particular move to strengthen economic action against Iran.”What measures can Iran take?Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs, without openly mentioning Washington, said there had been “miscalculations”.“They are forced to create a bigger defeat for themselves each time to cover it up,” the Iranian official wrote on X. “The military war did not work, so now they have called the next failure ‘economic war’.”Military actionAli Vaez, International Crisis Group’s deputy programme director for the Middle East and North Africa, said that if the economic pain worsens for Iran, it may resort to breaking the American naval blockade with force.“Trump believes that Economic Warfare is an alternative to war. It’s a prelude to it,” he told Al Jazeera.Hassan Barari, a professor of international relations at the University of Jordan, also argued that US power over Iran has limits.“We cannot underestimate the significance and danger of the American move for the Iranian street, nor can we underestimate the Iranians’ desire to at least emerge strategically on equal footing with the United States,” Barari said.BRICS membershipAs the war drags on, Iran’s central bank chief announced last week that the country is set to join the BRICS New Development Bank. Joining the bank would help the country open up its economy to more international financing.BRICS is a grouping of major emerging economies. The acronym stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Since its establishment in 2006, it has expanded to include Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Indonesia. Trump has previously termed the alliance as “anti-American”.But so far the BRICS alliance of major developing economies has failed to issue a joint statement about the US war on Iran, amid internal divisions over the war which is affecting several members.New trade dealsSeparately, Iran has also been beefing up bilateral agreements with countries like Tajikistan.On Saturday, Tajikistan and Iran finalised an agreement which would enable Tehran to export oil to Dushanbe.