The Ultimate Middle East Briefing
For Paid Subscribers: Amid the wreckage of miscalculations from Hormuz to Hezbollah and beyond, with elections coming in the US and Israel, a black swan event may be coming, as nature abhors illogic.
A calamitous phone call between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu underscored the strategic reality now hanging over the entire Iran war: the US appears to have entered a conflict it never fully decided how to finish. The military campaign itself was devastatingly effective: Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, missile capabilities, naval assets, intelligence apparatus, and much of the regime’s coercive machinery were mauled. Yet rarely has such an astonishing gap between battlefield success and strategic outcomes been exposed.
Trump appears desperate for an exit ramp from a war in which he had no plan for the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, such that it now threatens the global economy and his own presidency. Netanyahu finds himself more dependent on Washington than any Israeli leader in memory. Iran, though battered, has adapted by embracing asymmetric leverage through maritime disruption and regional instability. And America’s allies, rather than rallying behind a unified coalition, are hedging bets — partly in retaliation for Trump’s past tormenting of them with threats, insults, tariffs, political intervention and just plain nonsense.
Thus a justifiable war, but one carried out by two spectacularly flawed leaders, may sadly come to be remembered as one of the great strategic miscalculations of the modern era. That is especially true if Trump’s exit ramp ends up being paved by hundreds of billions of dollars being fast-tracked to a regime that recently massacred thousands of its own people.
The least-bad option in my view would be a completely crushing, globally-backed land, sea and air blockade of Iran, aimed at bringing down the regime no matter what. And least bad though it be, it would throw the world into recession. That shows you where idiocy will get you.
I discussed all this today on Al Jazeera, Israel’s I24 and India’s NewsX. Below is a detailed roundup.
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