Iranian official Rezaei says "The best response to Trump's escalation of economic warfare is to withdraw from the NPT [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty]."

Talk of NPT withdrawal from Iranian officials has surfaced repeatedly in past rounds of sanctions and pressure, and historically it has functioned as signalling rather than policy: an escalatory marker laid down to raise the cost of further economic measures without crossing the threshold itself. Rezaei is a long-standing hardline figure whose public positions have tended to sit at the hawkish edge of the Iranian spectrum, so the read-through depends on whether the line is echoed by the presidency, the foreign ministry, or the Supreme Leader's office, since withdrawal is a state decision and not one a commentator of this rank can take. The precedent in comparable episodes is that rhetoric of this kind has typically been walked back or left dormant once it has served its negotiating purpose, while actual treaty withdrawal remains a step no comparable actor has taken lightly and one that would invite a qualitatively different international response. The transmission channel where it matters is crude: the pattern in past escalation cycles has been risk premia appearing in prompt WTI and Brent spreads and in Gulf freight and insurance costs, with the move fading if no physical or legal action follows. The tells worth noting are whether the language is repeated at higher levels, whether it is tied to any formal parliamentary or Guardian Council process, and whether it precedes changes in enrichment behaviour, which is the sequence escalation episodes of this kind have tended to follow.