The US Treasury has run a named, continuous sanctions campaign against Iran throughout the war, even as the White House has signed no new Iran measure. Treasury calls the campaign Economic Fury, and it operates under National Security Presidential Memorandum 2 (NSPM-2), a pre-war order that delegates designation power to the department rather than requiring a fresh presidential signature1.
On 27 May the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), Treasury's sanctions arm, designated Iran's Persian Gulf Strait Authority for extorting Hormuz shipping tolls; on 10 June it blacklisted nine China and Hong Kong entities for arming the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)2. Treasury says the campaign has frozen "nearly half a billion" dollars and disrupted "tens of billions" in regime-linked revenue3. A direct query of the Federal Register returned zero new Iran filings between 29 June and 2 July4.
The gap between an empty signing record and live enforcement has a mechanism. NSPM-2 delegates designation authority to OFAC through executive orders that predate the conflict, so Treasury can keep naming targets while any genuinely new instrument stalls. The one Iran action that did need a fresh signature, General Licence X, loosened sanctions rather than tightening them, and its missing escrow and reporting caps handed Chinese buyers a 60-day safe harbour. Relief requires a pen; pressure does not.
Donald Trump's public words and Washington's actions point in opposite directions. On 30 June he demanded cheap petrol on Truth Social and signed nothing; on 1 July he called the denuclearisation of Iran "moving along well"5. His earlier order for a Justice Department oil-gouging probe sits in the same column: enforcement motion that does not require settling the war.
