The Least Bad Option

A Total Blockade of Iran - for PAID SUBSCRIBERS

Something is badly out of balance between the United States and the Iranian regime: the Iranians benefitted from a monumental American capitulation, yet could not take yes for an answer. Now it seems that at least low-scale warfare will be around for a while, at the very least, even though American voters don’t seem to want it and the midterms are approaching. Asked about this on I24 just now, what I could come up with is that the Iranians simply pushed Trump too far.

So at the recent NATO summit in Ankara Trump called Iran’s rulers “scum,” “evil,” and “cancer.” Not so elegantm obviously, but hard to argue with. The Memorandum of Understanding American Capitulation was, “as far as I’m concerned,” over, he said — moments later suggesting negotiators might continue talking. Yet there are no talks — rather the Iranians this week have been lobbing pebbles at America’s Gulf mini-allies and successfuly inviting attacks, and today Iran has reportedly instructed Hezbollah and other members of its regional “Axis of Resistance” to prepare for the possibility of a much broader war.

According to Lebanon’s Nidaa Al Watan, discussions held in Tehran during the funeral of the dispatched supreme leader Ali Khamenei concluded that military readiness is now the priority. Iranian officials allegedly warned Hezbollah that any future conflict would be larger and more destructive than previous rounds of fighting, ordering the group to remain fully prepared for rapid escalation.

And, indeed, over the past week, after Iran attacked commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, the United States launched repeated waves of air and naval strikes targeting Iranian coastal radar, air defenses, anti-ship missiles, Revolutionary Guard naval assets, bridges, ports, and other military infrastructure around the Gulf. Iran retaliated with missile and drone attacks on US facilities and partner countries including Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, and Oman, while also threatening regional energy infrastructure and maritime traffic.

For a brief moment, Trump warned that the US would impose tolls on Hormuz traffic — undercutting his own best argument against allowing iran to do any such thing (Claire Berlinski and I unpacked this on Critical Conditions yesterday). On the one hand, there’s no escaping the fact that he seems to be truly an idiot. On the other, at least he was prevailed upon to walk it back, and like the rest of his nonsense it will probably be forgotten. By the way: the US and Iran are among the few countries in the world that never ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which we will examine tomorrow.

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To understand what’s next, which we will try to do, it’s important to start by seeing clearly the sequence of events that brought us here.

The rest of this article is for Paid Subscribers