Lest anyone still entertain the idea that Washington conducts military interventions abroad for the sake of "democracy" or because it "stands with the people" or for "human rights" - we bring you Thursday's testimony of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent before the Senate Banking Committee...

Bessent boasts, not for the first time, that it was actually crippling US sanctions which in large part fueled the January mass protests and riots which left thousands dead, also following intense clashes with police, and in some cases attacks on security services and the burning of buildings.

This isn't actually the first time the Treasury Secretary was this blunt and revealing about the aim of US sanctions and regime change.

In March 2025, he spoke to the New York Economic Club and said the goal is "Making Iran Broke Again". "Watch this space," he said at the time. "If economic security is national security, the regime in Tehran will have neither."

US sanctions are all about applying enough pain and suffering on the common populace in order to foment destabilization. Interestingly, Bessent has further claimed that Iranian leaders are moving money out of the country "like crazy" in a signal which could spell "the end may be near" for current Iranian rulers.

He went on in the Thursday Senate presentation to the declare "the rats are leaving the ship" in Iran, pointing to what he described as accelerating capital flight among the country's leadership.

The geopolitical and miliary fronts have seen setback after setback for Iran as well:

• Israel has carried out assassinations of top Iranian nuclear scientists, as well as helped plan the US assassination of IRGC Commander Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. 
• Over the past two years, it has also assassinated the leadership of anti-Israel groups funded by Iran in the region, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. 
• In June, a 12-day war began with Israeli strikes on Iran that killed between 1,060 and 1,190 Iranians. This constant scenario of being under political and military siege pushes Iran into cycles that dig its economic hole deeper.

Trump is keeping up his maximum pressure campaign, and has been able to get Tehran to the table, but there's still an uphill battle if the two sides hope to forge a new agreement.

The above Rubio speech outlines where things stand from Washington's perspective, and so a new US strike on the Islamic Republic in the near future seems likely at this point.