Trump’s pressure campaign has Iran reeling. America can’t hesitate now
Iranian officials claim the regime is "confident" and are considering escalation against the United States. Iran may indeed lash out, but it would be coming from a place of desperation, not strength. On Saturday, Sept. 5, U.S. Central Command struck three Iranian tankers. "Let the message to the IRGC be clear: If you shoot at two of our ships, we will impose an even higher economic cost — taking out three of yours," said Admiral Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command. Three days later, U.S. Central Command said it destroyed five more tankers, after the IRGC "targeted a U.S. Navy warship with ballistic missiles twice over the past two days."
President Donald Trump has chosen to crush the Iranian regime economically, but U.S. military strikes (that are hitting their intended targets at an astoundingly near-perfect success rate) continue to play a major role. The combination of the blockade, sanctions and periodic punishing strikes has crippled the Iranian regime’s ability to impose much harm to the United States or its allies. The current course is not a permanent solution to the Iranian regime problem, but the United States is winning, and the public narrative should reflect that.
The U.S. strikes were in response to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) failed attempts to hit U.S. Navy ships. U.S. officials told reporters last week that half of the 25 ballistic missiles Iran fired toward Jordan failed to so much as enter Jordanian airspace.
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What should we make of this? The regime has always been bad at targeting, but all of its challenges have been exacerbated by the U.S. and Israeli campaigns, and whatever help it continues to receive from the Russians or Chinese does appear to be limited in its effectiveness. This shouldn’t get these other Iranian backers off the hook for supporting our enemies in a hot war, but it does give credence to the Trump administration’s contention that so far, the help the Iranian regime is receiving hasn’t had a meaningful impact in the IRGC’s favor.
We don't know much more about what the United States is doing to prevent other nations from assisting Iran, but Russian and Chinese support for the Iranian regime continues to be my No. 1 concern about the possible duration and expansion of the war and something to track closely.
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And as for diplomacy? Trump has concluded correctly that those in power in Tehran are not ready to make a deal. "I couldn’t care less if they sign a worthless, to them, agreement. I like our position now much better, with almost total control of the Hormuz Strait, and their economy totally collapsing. They are just playing out the inevitable. When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?" Trump wrote on social media.
This is good news, as the short-lived so-called Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) permitted the Iranians to sell oil and gave the regime temporary economic reprieve even though the IRGC never intended to stop trying to toll the Strait of Hormuz or shooting at commercial shipping.
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Just a few weeks ago, critics of Trump and his decision to launch Operation Epic Fury, were insisting that Trump needed to simply leave the Middle East and accept that he led the United States to failure against the Islamic Republic. The popular narrative is that the regime is now "more hardlined" and "more determined" to get a nuclear weapon and now has significant leverage over the United States through its terrorist behavior against commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
The critics get it wrong and are recycling some of the erroneous assumptions used to prop up President Barack Obama’s "Iran deal." There are no moderates within the Islamic Republic of Iran. The regime has been in dogged pursuit of a nuclear weapon for years, and it was only thwarted through sanctions and now, finally, Trump’s decision to engage militarily. It is a myth that the regime was so formidable that the only course was to accept that the Iranians will have a latent nuclear program, and it is best to simply accept it and try to buy off or appease the regime.
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U.S. military operations have demonstrated military competency and credibility and have degraded or eliminated entire categories of Iran’s military, significant regime leadership and key industries the regime used to support its military. Now the United States is seeking to cut off the regime’s resources through a very effective naval blockade, sanctions and selective secondary sanctions.
But the use of military strikes also continues in bursts. Trump said Tuesday, Sept. 8, that he is prepared to authorize additional strikes against Iran "any time we want." According to a Wall Street Journal report, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has extended the deployment of approximately 50,000 U.S. troops and 19 warships in the Middle East.
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Independent sources have now confirmed what the Trump administration has claimed: U.S. Central Command is effectively guiding dozens of commercial ships through the strait carrying millions of barrels of oil, even amid strikes to take out Iranian launchers and radar. The United States successfully eliminated many of its targets during the most violent strikes of Operation Epic Fury, and the regime is dramatically weakened, perhaps irredeemably structurally so.
Uncle Sam has the momentum, and the Trump administration should initiate a public campaign to share the good news with the American people who have been fed a regular dose of pessimism from some news media and so-called analysts who appear to be rooting for U.S. failure.
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But until the United States can return its military to pre-war deployments around the Strait, and restore its deployments to other key geographic theaters including in the Pacific and Europe, the U.S. campaign against the Iranian regime continues.
The Trump administration should not back off its demands that the enriched uranium be removed from Iran and that the Strait of Hormuz remain free and open to commercial shipping. This will take skilled diplomacy — not with the terror regime in Iran — but with our closest ally, Israel, and our allies in Europe, as well as with Gulf partners who would be wise to continue normalizing relations with Israel and eschewing investments from the Iranian regime’s backers in Beijing and Moscow.