The conflict between the US and Iran is beginning to flare again and President Donald Trump says he couldn’t care less. He’s confident his new plan for an “Economic D-Day” that brings Iran to heel by collapsing its economy is a winner. Perhaps, but making it so will take a great deal of international cooperation. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it: “You’re either with us or against us.”
Bessent was echoing George W. Bush, when the then-president told Congress after 9/11 that every country in the world would have to choose to either be with the US, or against it on the side of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other terrorists. Sadly for Bessent, his boss and a beleaguered Iranian people, this isn’t 2001. It’s 2026, a time a world away in which the appeal is set up to fail.
