In the long contest between economic pressure and national resolve, the United States has found a new lever — not the airspace itself, but the invisible infrastructure beneath it. Beginning Wednesday, American sanctions threaten any foreign company that fuels, lands, or tickets Iranian aircraft, effectively grounding Iran's regional connections through the logic of financial exclusion rather than direct prohibition. Iran, for its part, reroutes where it can and negotiates where it must, while its leadership insists that no amount of pressure will alter its fundamental posture — a familiar stan