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If Bessent and U.S. President Donald Trump had wanted to match their own rhetoric, according to Tom ⁠Keatinge, director of the Centre for Finance and Security at the Royal United Services Institute, they could have targeted a major Chinese or UAE financial institution ​helping the Iranian regime move money around the world. After all China accounts for 90% of Iranian oil exports, which generated $43 billion, opens new tab for Tehran in 2024.

The UK Financial Intelligence Unit (UKFIU) has been described as ‘one of the most materially significant structural weaknesses in the country’s economic crime system’ in a report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the well-known defence and security think-tank. [...] ‘The example of state actors exploiting scam centres to target UK victims illustrates a convergence of fraud, national security and illicit finance that taskforce members doubted the UK’s economic crime response is inadequately set up to deal with,’ the analysis warns".

Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at London’s Royal United Services Institute, noted that Ukrainian development of its own ballistic and cruise missiles will complement the mass of firepower it can launch using drones, which are relatively slow and not that stealthy. A weapon like a SCALP missile “has a sophisticated warhead and strikes the target at a velocity that means it can penetrate hardened structures and destroy buried targets in a way a slower drone without such a warhead is unable to do, at present,” Savill said".