US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spoke with the AP on Sunday ahead of Group of 20 meetings in Asheville, North Carolina, where he will meet individually with his counterparts from the world's major and developing economies to encourage co-operation against Iran.
"This is going to be financial violence if we have to," Bessent said.
"We are showing people that we know who you are, you know who you are, and this has got to stop."
The Trump administration recently signalled that it would shift from military strikes to economic pressure during a war that recently reached the six-month mark, promising what it called an "economic D-Day" against a country that has already weathered decades of punishing sanctions.
However, hostilities between the US and Iran flared on Sunday.
US forces struck Iranian rocket launchers on the Strait of Hormuz in their first military action in a month, breaking a lull in fighting. Iran vowed to retaliate for what it called a deadly attack.
In addition, the administration has mostly relied on warnings rather than new sanctions against Iran's trading partners. There's also the question of how Trump will handle China, which is Iran's biggest trading partner and leading buyer of its oil.
Bessent said he would speak to his Chinese counterparts at the G20 meeting and "all options are on the table" in terms of sanctioning Beijing for its continued purchases.
But he rejected the idea that the administration was reluctant to confront China, calling it "a completely false narrative that the media picked up on".
He insisted that China and the US agree on the need to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
Treasury's first official action in this campaign of economic pressure was a proposed rulemaking on Friday, which would, if finalised, sever the Emirati branches of Banque Misr, Egypt's second-largest bank, from access to the US financial system.
In stopping short of imposing sanctions on the Egyptian bank, the US appeared to be signalling its reluctance to penalise major trading partners that do business with Iran, including China and India.
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