"Abandon all hope ye who enter here."

That, famously, is the inscription above the gates of hell in Dante's Inferno, and, if Uncle Sam gets his way, it will be the first thing that comes to mind for any company seeking to skirt the Iranian sanctions that are snapping back into place in the coming months.

Why? Because there are a growing number of companies and even entire countries that are openly proclaiming that they will not go along with these latest sanctions and will continue trading with Iran as before.

Now let's be clear: There is always diplomatic arm-twisting and wrangling that occurs whenever a powerful nation (or group of nations) wants to sanction another. If a blanket UN resolution upholding the sanction regime fails to pass, there is always the tried-and-true tricks of carrot-and-stick diplomacy that can be deployed. Backs can be scratched, deals brokered, threats made, and hey presto! your ability to exert economic pressure on an enemy (even one who is already economically distanced from you) can be greatly amplified by your allies. For an example of this, see any of the sanctions that the US has slapped on Russia in recent years and the way Canada, the EU and other US allies can be pressured into going along with them.

But this round of US-imposed sanctions—attempting to block businesses from trading with large swaths of the Iranian economy—is decidedly different. For example, it's not often that you see a US Treasury Secretary having to publicly threaten a major American company, but that's essentially what happened when swamp creature Steven Mnuchin told Boeing (as well as Europe's Airbus) that they will "have their licenses revoked" for dealing with Iran, thus costing the company tens of billions of dollars in lost business.

Neither is it common to see the US outright threaten to sanction allies who don't go along with sanctions against enemies, but that's precisely what happened when swamp creature John Bolton suggested there would be secondary sanctions on European companies that trade with Iran.

The pressure seems to be working. Many companies are throwing in the towel already and caving to the pressure. France's Total has already announced that it is highly unlikely it will be able to continue with its investment in the South Pars natural gas field development, and the chairman of the world's top oil trader has declared the sanctions to be unavoidable (inspiring the particularly blunt headline "There's No Getting Around Iranian Sanctions" from OilPrice.com).