Abu Dhabi tankers are attacked again as Washington imposes more sanctions

Fifty years of sanctions have never finished Iran off, and the man who runs its central bank says the country is exporting no oil at all, according to The National on August 20.

On Thursday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stood up and promised "the toughest sanctions in history," with a press conference set for Monday to lay out what he called the greatest coordinated economic isolation ever attempted, Reuters reported on August 20. The weapon has been tried against this country for half a century without once closing the deal. Meanwhile, the pressure Washington actually holds — a naval blockade since April, now paired with rhetoric — has failed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The United States is about to announce that its economic isolation will be total, against an enemy whose economy has already been isolated and did not break.

Bessent's Monday package

On August 13 and 14, drones struck two ADNOC-affiliated tankers making outbound runs through the strait, and a third vessel was hit within twenty-four hours. Crews were safe, damage was minor, and Abu Dhabi blamed Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps outright, calling the attacks on the waterway "acts of piracy," according to gCaptain on August 14.

ADNOC now counts nineteen of its own vessels struck since the war began, as reported by TZP News on August 17.

Two days after those strikes, the UAE suspended all trade, commercial exchanges and financial transactions with Iran until further notice, according to Al-Monitor on August 19. Official goods trade between the two ran to $6.2 billion in 2023, much of it the informal re-export channel through which Iran buys everything from food to machine parts, Al Jazeera reported on August 19. That suspension is not a gesture.

ADNOC has quietly become the logistics spine of Gulf oil while everyone else stands down. Its trading arm is offering to shuttle Iraqi crude through the strait on short hops, sometimes with transponders dark, transferring cargo to waiting ships outside the Gulf — Iraq's state marketer SOMO has confirmed the arrangement, according to Bloomberg on August 14. The company Iran keeps shooting at is the one keeping barrels moving for Iran's own largest customer. Tehran is striking the operator whose competence makes the blockade look porous.

UKMTO's weekly report recorded just seventy-five outbound and seventy-six inbound full transits over the seven days to August 14 — seventeen percent of the pre-war average, against more than a hundred and thirty ships a day before the conflict. Operators increasingly favor the northern route, which Iran controls, because the southern American-coordinated lane through Omani waters absorbed sixteen of eighteen projectile strikes reported since July 6, gCaptain cited from the UKMTO strike log on August 14. Ships are routing around the US Navy to pass under Iranian guns.

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright still puts Hormuz flows near nine million barrels a day, roughly half of normal, according to TZP News on August 17, and half of normal means somebody, somewhere, is not getting crude.

Bessent wants a victory that does not require a military restart — he said so plainly, arguing maximum economic pressure makes large-scale fighting less likely, Reuters reported on August 20. Donald Trump wants bargaining strength before any settlement and has threatened consequences for any country giving Iran "any type of lifeline," according to Reuters on August 20.

Tehran is split against itself: President Masoud Pezeshkian argued this week the war should end now, and parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf warned Iran cannot survive hunger and a frozen economy regardless of military strength — while IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi's camp holds out for American surrender and tolerates the hardship, according to the Institute for the Study of War on August 21. The Emirates want their waterway and their trade back, and have just burned their own bridge to Tehran to prove it.

China, which bought over eighty percent of Iran's seaborne oil by Kpler's 2025 count, as reported by Reuters on August 20, resists the isolation but cannot conjure barrels that cannot physically sail.

Beijing draws half its energy from inside the Gulf and would do itself "a big service to get with the program," Bessent said (Reuters, Aug 20) — an admission that the strait matters more to Iran's customers than to Iran, and therefore that cutting off what little Iran still moves hurts China's alternatives, not just Iran's economy.

Brent sits near $92 a barrel, a four-week high, after Iran fired ballistic missiles toward the Emirates and Trump confirmed no talks are underway, AGBI reported on August 20. Every escalation prices oil higher, and higher oil pays for exactly the Russian, Chinese and Central Asian workaround trade the sanctions are meant to strangle.

The Tanker War model

In the 1980s Tanker War, Iran mined the Gulf and Kuwait's answer was to reflag its tankers under the American flag and let the US Navy escort them — Operation Earnest Will, the largest convoy operation since World War Two. The escorts worked; hulls stopped burning. This time there is no neutral flag to hide behind, because the ships being hit belong to a US security partner, and the US Navy's own coordinated lane is where the projectiles land.

The counterexample argues equally hard the other way. Fifty years of sanctions, more than six thousand measures currently on the books across banking, energy and aviation, according to The National on August 20, have impoverished Iran without ever changing a single strategic decision of its leadership. The clerical regime has outlasted every treasury secretary who promised its collapse.

If Bessent's Monday package includes secondary penalties on buyers of Iranian oil, the first squeeze lands not in Tehran but in the trading houses of Dubai and the Chinese independent refiners who take discounted barrels. The second squeeze lands in Abu Dhabi, which just cut its own $6.2 billion channel and now depends on ADNOC's dark-transit shuttle — a system that invites more drones with every voyage it completes.

Insurers will reprice again, the shuttle gets costlier, and the marginal barrel exits the market. The winners sit outside the fight entirely: Atlantic-basin crude sellers, Cape-of-Good-Hope tonnage owners, and every trader holding inventory in a market that keeps discovering scarcity.

Transit counts stay pinned near seventeen percent of normal even after Monday's announcement, and another ADNOC hull is hit within days of new designations — evidence that the sanctions change the ledger while the attacks continue. What breaks the read is an actual reopening deal between Iran, Oman and Washington, which Iran says is close and which Trump answered this week by threatening to bomb Oman if it "gets in the way," Reuters reported on August 20. If Muscat signs something, the entire sanctions architecture becomes theater overnight.

The people absorbing all of this are the Filipino and Indian crews sailing ADNOC's shuttle under darkened transponders, the small traders of the Dubai souks who just lost their Iranian counterparties, and Iranian families watching the rial slide while two factions in Tehran argue over whether hunger is a price or a weapon.

Bessent believes the ledger can do what the Fifth Fleet cannot. The Gulf has heard that promise before, and the tankers are still on fire.