Noah Rothman, on today’s edition of The Editors, is keeping a weather eye on the U.S. military build-up near Iran. Rich comments that “Trump is just holding this hammer over Iran, and unless he gets a deal that he considers adequate, there’s some likelihood that he’s going to carry out a strike.”
Noah agrees, adding that he’s “quite confused by what we expect to get out of this diplomatic overture that we’ve made to Iran. On the table, supposedly . . . is not just the country’s nuclear program, supposedly, but its support for terrorist proxies abroad and its ballistic missile program.
“What we want is not a truncation or curtailment of support for any of that stuff,” says Noah. “We want it all to go away. That’s why we executed Operation Midnight Hammer.”
Noah’s “not entirely sure” why we would entertain diplomatic talks with Iran’s leaders, but he “suspect[s] that this diplomatic track served two purposes. One, to buy time to move the assets necessary to execute some really major decisive attack on Iran. . . . and also to satisfy our partners in the region.
“U.S. capabilities in the region are really quite impressive. And it’s not just the fact that we have two carrier groups and all the sundry munitions associated with them, as well as assets and airfields all over the region now. But these are all next-generation capabilities. And as we saw in Venezuela . . . U.S. technological capabilities are nothing like what we had in the Iraq War.”
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