President Donald Trump is “strangling” Iran’s economy to pressure the “radical lunatics” running the country to give up on ever developing nuclear weapons, Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) told Breitbart News.
McCormick laid out President Trump’s Iran war economic strategy while speaking with Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow at the 2026 Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) National Leadership Summit on Aug. 31. Marlow asked McCormick to provide some insight into why President Trump has decided “not to basically level Iran completely with bombs” in favor of an economic war.
“He said from day one, we’re going to use all the tools at our disposal. The military campaign, just in objective terms, by any measure, has been devastating to taking out Iran’s military capability. I was looking at some statistics. I was in the Gulf War, which was viewed at the time as the most successful high-tech war in the history of the world. And if you look at the number of airplanes, manufacturing facilities, missile launchers and all of that, that have been destroyed in this campaign, it’s orders of magnitude more effective than what happened in the Gulf War,” McCormick replied.
“So we’ve definitely degraded their military capabilities dramatically — not entirely, but dramatically. But, hand-in-hand with that is an economic campaign that’s putting more and more pressure on the leadership of Iran. And the numbers are devastating. Just to put in perspective, just this calendar year, inflation is 70 percent. The currency depreciated by 40 percent. The economy shrunk by six percent. Unemployment is over ten percent. People are waiting in lines for fuel, waiting in lines for bread,” he continued. “So the pressure on the Iranian community … the leadership is growing.”
“We’re squeezing and strangling them, and that pressure, coupled with the military pressure, we hope will get them to act more reasonably in terms of giving up their nuclear weapons program, which they have, up until this point, not been willing to do,” he said. “A lot of that is driven by the blockade, the economic blockade, because their economy is 90 percent dependent on oil.”
McCormick said the next step is to sanction other countries who continue to do business with Iran.
“The next stage of the economic battle is a series of secondary sanctions. In other words, we go to other countries in the world, and we say, ‘Listen, if you’re going to do business with Iran, we’re going to sanction you.’ That is going to tighten the noose even further. And that combination of things, you know, Iran faces a choice. There’s a fork in the road,” he said.
“The fork in the road is they continue down this path, which is devastating to their country, to their economy, or they compromise, and they give up their nuclear weapons,” he continued. “We hope that this will add to the pressure.”
“Why didn’t President Trump decide to just level the economy? I think it’s wise because basically, he wants a prosperous and successful Iran,” he noted. “The Iranian people here aren’t the problem. This is one of the great societies of the world. It’s the radical lunatics that have been running the place for the last 47 years, and that’s where I think he’s focused.”
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.