US VP Vance says that their main focus is not really on that, when asked how long Iran could withstand economic pressure, while he added Iran is under a lot of pressure which helps achieve our goal of making sure that Iran does not get a nuclear weapon

Statements of this kind sit in the long-running US maximum pressure framework on Iran, where sanctions enforcement on crude exports has been the primary lever and the stated objective has consistently been denial of a nuclear capability. The deflection on the timeline question is itself a familiar feature of this posture: officials have historically avoided quantifying how long pressure takes to bite, since doing so concedes either that sanctions have limits or that escalation is the fallback. What has mattered for crude in comparable episodes is not the rhetoric but the enforcement channel that follows, specifically designations on shipping networks, dark-fleet tankers, and the insurers and refiners that intermediate Iranian barrels into Asian markets. The deflection also leaves open whether the pressure track is a prelude to negotiation or to kinetic options, a distinction that has tended to separate brief risk premia from sustained ones, with the latter requiring a physical disruption to flows through the Gulf rather than sanctions signaling alone. Follow-ons worth noting are any Treasury or State designations, movement in Iranian export volumes, and whether diplomatic channels open or close in response.