[A] closed strait [of Hormuz] is a chokehold on Iran’s own windpipe, because the overwhelming share of Iran’s trade and oil exports must pass through that same water.... A chokepoint you can obstruct but cannot profit from, defended by a navy that no longer exists, is not a lever of power. It is a siege, and Iran is on the losing side of it. ... The essay’s hidden premise is continuity, an Iran picking up where it left off, only leaner and bolder. Compare the two trajectories honestly. The Iran of the road not taken had a maturing missile and drone industry, a rebuilding air-defense network, an intact ring of proxies, and Hormuz leverage backed by a genuine fleet, all of it shielding a nuclear program as it advanced toward a survivable deterrent. The Iran of June 2026 has a defense-industrial base gutted by 90%, a navy measured in decades of repair, proxies severed and fending for themselves, an economy in freefall, and a command structure Cooper described as “shattered.” The first Iran was being built. The second is being salvaged. [The uranium] ... sounds like a card Tehran still holds. It is closer to a noose. A stockpile is not a deterrent by itself. A deterrent requires a survivable means to build, conceal, and deliver a weapon, and an air-defense umbrella to keep the effort alive long enough to matter. Iran has lost all three. Nasr himself warns that ordinary Iranians increasingly see the bomb as their only shield. Precisely so. A hollowed-out state whose last available move is a dash toward a weapon it cannot protect is not safer for having the material. It is more exposed, because that dash is the single act most certain to summon the finishing blow the regime has so far been spared by President Trump.
Alexander Muse has been publishing excellent essays this year. On Iran's purported victory lap:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
Yes, for years I have been recommending professionally that the 5th Fleet reconsider its mission from keeping the strait open to closing it. The gas prices are painfully high; more for those of you who don’t live on a motorcycle! That said, there’s a grand strategy victory here— not just regarding Iran, but China.
I've always had a problem with statistics offered without context. Maybe Cooper offered it in his closed door testimony, maybe the politicians (and their staffers?) asked for it during that closed door testimony, but it's not reported.
...1,450 strikes on weapons-manufacturing facilities alone....
...
Against how many such facilities extant before the strikes went in? How many of those strikes resulted in complete destruction of the facility, how many only suffered damage, and to what extent? How many repeat strikes are included in that number?
...10,200 sorties and over 13,500 strikes....
...sunk 161 vessels across 16 classes of warships...
To what effect from the perspective of the men and women of the Iranian government? These sound like Vietnam-era body count stats absent context. And so on.
...destroyed or severely degraded the backbone of Iran’s missile, drone, naval, and air-defense infrastructure....
More than a nuisance-level force remains from the perspective of the shippers wanting to cross the Strait of Hormuz in either direction.
Iran closing the Strait is putting a noose around its own neck? From whose perspective? Iran's command structure is shattered? From whose perspective? It looks more like a heavily decentralized structure to me, one they've rehearsed for decades. Just like we did as a matter of course in the USAF.
Most important, beyond any statistic, is this. The reason Iran hasn't been defeated isn't due to any failure of the combat effort or our own blockade of Iran. It's because those phases haven't gone far enough. Iran hasn't been defeated because the men and women of the Iranian government don't believe they've been defeated: they still live to struggle on.
That's the lesson of the Second Punic War, and it's time we heeded it.
Eric Hines
As Eric states: "......the.....Iranian gov't ....don't believe they've been defeated." Thus the Iranians' tactic: do not negotiate, knowing that by September, petroleum inventories worldwide will be so small that the entire petroleum system may collapse. The uglies actually begin in mid-June.
We should never have gone in there. Period.
Those 'uglies' are global stresses, which the US is better-placed to endure than any of the other powers. The threat is having its effect: just today Britain and France announced they would move to retask EU naval support to mine-clearance and keeping the strait open in the future. "When conditions allow," which I gather means when they don't think it's very risky; but appetitie for risk is already modulating.
"We should never have gone in there. Period."
I think Eric's argument amounts to that we never did go in there, which is the problem. The 5th Fleet isn't a new addition to the region, but we have no boots on the ground -- probably out of a concern about 'not going in,' though that is an estimate of mine rather than something I have reason to know for a fact.
As I was saying a couple of posts down, often we agree to disagree here as a matter of mutual respect. In this case, though, it doesn't really matter what any of us think; the administration is not interested in any external advice. It's their ball, and they'll end up having to own the results whatever they are. To my mind some strong positives remain possible, but as I admitted in the comments to your post, I don't really understand what they're thinking. They're definitely not doing it the way I would have, not that they asked me.
<"It looks more like a heavily decentralized structure to me, one they've rehearsed for decades."
The Arabs and Persians not very well known for decentralized structures and localized leadership- other than black markets, and maybe tribal governance, but within the tribal structures it's right back to rigid top heavy hierarchies.
Nobody asked me, either, but I'm not convinced we need boots on the ground to inflict real defeat on the Iranian government. I think two things would be sufficient for the short term. One is resuming and expanding the pace as much as may be the destruction from the air of the government's ability to power and fuel its war-making factories, destroying directly those factories, eliminating the government's remaining stockpile of missiles and drones. Destroying the power and fuel ability would be sufficiently done, with less permanent damage to the civilian environment, by cutting long lengths of pipelines from the wells, into and out of those factories, and into the exporting ports and terminals.
Of course, there would be considerable overlap between those targets and purely civilian targets, but collateral damage always is unavoidable, only minimizable.
In conjunction with that, the Israelis have been very good at killing particular personnel in the Iranian government (for clarity at this point, I include the IRGC in that government); they should be unleashed for the purpose.
I do think Trump is making a mistake by letting Iran include the separate conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in any "agreement" between the US and Israel and Iran.
Longer term, the Gulf States are setting seriously about building out pipeline and rail networks to the Arabian Sea and to the Red Sea. If these come to fruition in a few years, the Strait will be largely irrelevant. I think they would do well to work the diplomatic arrangements extend those networks directly to the eastern Med, bypassing the Suez Canal. The canal is its own bottleneck; it wouldn't take much to sink one or two cargo ships in the canal, blocking it for some weeks, and demonstrating the threat for some years.
Eric Hines
The Arabs and Persians not very well known for decentralized structures....
The IRGC in Iran is pretty atypical in this regard.
Eric Hines
The Persians were, actually, even in Xenophon's day. You may remember from our reading of it together: the Persians came from everywhere, each one reporting to his own chief, all of those self-interested and careful to make a showy display of their loyalty to the throne rather than to run actual risks fighting professional Greek soldiers. I think that is the fear the IRGC has about the regular Iranian military, which I have been told they have disarmed because they don't trust it in moments of stress.
Post a Comment