On the morning of 6 June 1944, General Dwight Eisenhower sent Allied troops onto the beaches of Normandy. Eight decades later, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been handed a far more unconventional brief: to impose economic isolation on Iran after six months of US bombing — reversing the traditional sequence of diplomacy, sanctions, and force entirely. Whether history will reward that inversion, or condemn it, may depend in large part on the man now managing a $40 trillion national debt while simultaneously engineering a financial siege. Bessent's path to this moment is, by any measure, improbable.

A Yale graduate from South Carolina, class of 1984, he spent formative years working for the liberal philanthropist George Soros in London, including on the celebrated 1992 bet against the British pound. That trade, executed on what markets came to call Black Wednesday, earned enormous profits when sterling was forcibly ejected from Europe's Exchange Rate Mechanism. The former Democratic donor — who backed Al Gore's presidential campaign in the early 2000s — has since repositioned himself as the intellectual architect of Trump's economic nationalism, championing spending cuts and tariff-based industrial policy. His critics, however, are unconvinced by the transformation.

Steve Schmidt, a Republican strategist who ran John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, has called Bessent "bar none, the worst treasury secretary in the history of the United States", invoking Alexander Hamilton's legacy to dramatise the distance he perceives between competence and the current occupant of the role. The months ahead will test which reading is correct.