The Trump administration risks a clash with Beijing as it tries to cut off Iran’s economic lifelines without upending a fragile U.S.-China truce.

China lashed out at the Trump administration’s new sanctions campaign against Iran on Tuesday, warning that it would defend its interests and accusing the United States of disrupting the global financial order.

The reaction set the stage for renewed friction between the world’s superpowers.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday outlined plans to “sever every economic lifeline” to Iran, targeting a constellation of players that continue to provide the country with a financial lifeline. But the administration appeared to tread carefully around China, by far the largest customer of Iran’s most valuable export: oil.

The U.S. list of more than 60 brokers, companies and ships subject to sanctions included more than a dozen small companies from Hong Kong and mainland China. Conspicuously absent were heavyweights in China’s financial system — a sign, some experts said, that Washington was reluctant to jeopardize a fragile truce with China.

Beijing nevertheless responded forcefully. China will “take all necessary measures to firmly safeguard its own rights and interests,” Lin Jian, a spokesman for the foreign ministry, said at a news briefing on Tuesday.

Chinese state media went further. An editorial cartoon in China News portrayed the Statue of Liberty as a drug user with needles protruding from one arm, describing Washington’s use of sanctions as “an addiction.”

The confrontational reaction underscored a dilemma for the Trump administration. Beijing has long defied American sanctions and continued to buy Iranian oil. At the same time, China supplied Tehran with raw materials and technology that support its economy and military. Yet nearly six months into a war with Iran, the United States has shown little appetite for opening another economic front with an increasingly retaliatory China.

The timing is particularly delicate. China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, is expected to travel to the United States next month to meet with President Trump to continue talks aimed at stabilizing the countries’ relationship.

On Monday, when he was asked why the administration had not targeted Chinese banks, Mr. Bessent said only that “quiet diplomacy” was the best form of engagement. He did vow at one point to still penalize a large international financial institution, though he did not offer specifics. To some analysts, Mr. Bessent’s failure to call out China amounted to a tacit acknowledgment that preserving the truce with China may, for now, outweigh the benefits of taking more aggressive action against Iran.

Washington “has been extremely reluctant to go after China,” said Daniel Tannebaum, a Treasury Department official during the George W. Bush administration and now a partner at Oliver Wyman, a consulting firm. “I don’t think that changes today, especially at a time when China has more leverage than the United States does.”

For decades, the United States has exploited its central position in the global financial system to isolate adversaries like Iran and North Korea, threatening to exclude companies and banks from conducting transactions in dollars if they do business with sanctioned entities. Successive rounds of sanctions have largely left Iran cut off from the global financial system, but they have failed to incapacitate its economy.

But more recently, China has shown it is willing to use its own economic choke points. During the bruising trade war of the past year, Beijing restricted access to critical minerals and used its control over supply chains against American companies as leverage.

China agreed last year to temporarily postpone controls on exports of rare-earth minerals as part of a thaw in relations with the United States. That one-year reprieve is set to lapse weeks after Mr. Xi and Mr. Trump are scheduled to meet.

That leverage has raised the potential cost of confronting Beijing over Iran, even as China has become critical to Tehran’s ability to withstand American pressure.

Since the United States and Israel launched their attack on Iran on Feb. 28, Washington has imposed sanctions on more than 400 companies, people and ships tied to Iran from countries including Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and China.

It has added more than 1,000 entities to its sanctions list since the start of Mr. Trump’s second term, effectively cutting them off from the dollar, according to an analysis by The New York Times. The targets have included Chinese shipping companies and oil refiners.

Yet Iranian oil has continued to flow to China.

Large quantities are now sitting aboard ships and in storage tanks around the Malacca Strait and the South China Sea and near Chinese ports, according to Muyu Xu, a senior oil analyst at Kpler, an industry data provider.

Data from Kpler shows that China has received around 1.2 million barrels of oil a day from Iran so far in 2026, only slightly less than the same period last year. Up-to-date volumes are difficult to measure because ships have become increasingly skilled at evading detection, Ms. Xu said.

China’s three national state-controlled oil giants have avoided buying Iranian crude because of their extensive ties to Western banks. But privately owned Chinese refiners known as “teapots” have bought Iranian oil at steep discounts and turned it into gasoline and diesel for the domestic market.

Those companies can be especially difficult for Washington to pressure. Many have few international transactions that the Treasury Department can target by restricting access to the dollar through global banks. Instead, they are believed to conduct much of their trade in Chinese currency or cryptocurrencies.

The trade has also developed elaborate methods for shielding ships and cargoes from Western sanctions. Iranian oil is frequently transported to waters off Malaysia, where cargoes are transferred between vessels before continuing to Chinese ports.

In April, the United States targeted a handful of Chinese teapot refineries, including Hengli Petrochemical Refinery. One of Iran’s biggest customers, the refinery was found to have purchased billions of dollars of Iranian crude from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which wields considerable military, political and economic clout in Iran.

Still, even if the U.S. Treasury Department does not take overt measures against big Chinese banks, international banks might start curtailing business with them, said Han Lin, the China country director of the Asia Group, an American consulting firm. Big banks are wary about incurring the wrath of American regulators.

The big international banks “will become much more conservative about engaging in any transactions” with any Chinese financial institutions, he said.

Washington has confronted China over Iranian oil before. Around 2012, during the administration of President Barack Obama, American diplomats pressed China and other countries to wind down purchases of Iranian crude, which were then conducted more openly.

Around that time, the United States also put sanctions on Bank of Kunlun, a Chinese financial institution owned by China National Petroleum Corporation, over its ties to Iran and for doing business with Iranian banks already under sanctions.

But the Trump administration has stopped short of imposing the kind of sanctions on major financial institutions that could fundamentally disrupt Beijing’s economic relationship with Tehran.

“We have not in recent years demonstrated a willingness to run the risk of undermining our economic standing” in exchange for pushing Chinese banks away from Iran, said Richard Nephew, an official in the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear agreement.

There are powerful reasons for that caution. Mr. Nephew pointed to Washington’s 2018 sanctions against Oleg Deripaska and Rusal, the Russian giant that was then the world’s second-largest aluminum producer. Aluminum markets went haywire at the prospect that a major source of global supply could be cut off.

Targeting systemically important Chinese banks or companies could produce a shock on an entirely different scale.

“You could find markets going nuts,” Mr. Nephew said. “You could find companies going nuts. You can find insurance companies going nuts, banks going nuts.”

Murphy Zhao contributed reporting from Hong Kong.