If the administration had a more plausible theory of victory, those who argue for more airstrikes haven’t articulated it.
As I wrote yesterday, Iranian recalcitrance at the negotiating table is not helping America’s JD Vance-led team establish the conditions for a “deal” that lets America save face in retreat. Indeed, the U.S. side’s hunger for a deal may be hardening the Iranian position.
For his part, Donald Trump has recently backed away from his intention to pursue what the Wall Street Journal described as a “short, intense” campaign after the midterms, although he may just be talking down global energy markets. Still, despite the extensive reporting around preparations for a new phase of combat operations over the skies of Iran, it is not clear what that campaign would be designed to achieve.
By putting a timeline on it — “short” — we already know that renewed offensive operations will be conditioned by American political attitudes more than the conduct of the Iranian regime. That’s hardly a recipe for success.
The targets in renewed strikes could include “Iranian infrastructure and nuclear sites,” according to the Journal, as well as Iran’s missile and drone capabilities. But little in the public record indicates why policymakers in Washington believe those tactics will contribute to a broader strategic objective.
Theories abound, however. Sources within the administration told The Atlantic’s reporters that additional kinetic action could push Iran to either “economic collapse” or a complete regime implosion. The Stimson Center’s Barbara Slavin speculates that, “apart from saving face,” Trump would apply force to compel Iran to withdraw its threat to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. “We just have to have the regime come to their senses,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said — an even narrower goal.
Those would all be desirable outcomes, but it is hard to see how even a multi-day campaign of high-tempo airstrikes on Iranian military and dual-use industrial targets would radically alter the behavior of the Iranian security services in control in Tehran.
It would, of course, be valuable to neutralize Iran’s remaining nuclear capabilities in buried facilities like Pickaxe Mountain. But Iran’s nuclear material remains buried, visible from space, and containable if the regime attempts to recover it. And any strikes on it, Iran’s industrial base, or its missile capabilities would have to be a fulsome campaign — one big enough to hit Iran’s offensive capabilities before they can be launched at Gulf region targets. After all, America’s interceptor stockpiles remain disconcertingly depleted. Such a campaign might just harden the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps resolve to resist, even in the face of overwhelming economic pressure.
And that economic pressure is working to cripple the regime’s power projection capabilities as well as its domestic support. “The president and the US Navy can maintain this blockade for the foreseeable future,” said America’s U.N. ambassador Mike Waltz.
Now that sounds like a plan.
Indeed, if Axios’s reporting is correct, it’s the plan favored by administration officials like Bessent, CIA director John Ratcliffe, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “Ratcliffe told Trump that prolonged economic pain would induce Iran to make more concessions — or create enough instability inside the country that citizens revolt,” the report read. As a bonus, the perpetuation of the blockade strategy could sap the IRGC of authority inside the regime as Iran’s political officials, many of whom are vocally at odds with the nation’s security services, advocate concessions to Washington.
The prospect of a Democratic takeover of Congress adds variables to the equation that may also stay the president’s hand. If the opposition party romps the GOP, the public’s antipathy toward the war’s prolonged consequences will have contributed to that outcome. Democrats will feel pressure from their voters to act in some way to limit the president’s warmaking powers — all and only, of course, to reduce energy prices at home. But that makes no sense if the status quo Democrats seek to upend is the blockade alone.
A U.S. withdrawal from the region, giving Iran a free hand to throttle and toll traffic through the strait, will not put downward pressure on energy prices. Aside from the strategic disasters the U.S. would invite if it tacitly ceded its role as guarantor of free traffic on the high seas — risking the return of inviolable spheres of influence — slinking away from the strait would consign America to higher consumer costs in perpetuity.
If they end up catching the bus, Democrats should be forced to confront the illogic of their view that surrender to Iran would somehow produce a series of desirable outcomes. If, however, Democrats take office amid ongoing combat operations and their associated hardships, the passions of an antagonized American electorate may mute the incentives to engage constructively with logic.
If the administration had a more plausible theory of victory, those who argue for more airstrikes haven’t articulated it. Not in the near term, anyway. The side arguing for a negotiated surrender in this war doesn’t seem to care whether America wins it at all. Only a patient, methodical effort to drain Iran of its capacity to project power and fund terrorism seems likely to disrupt the Iranian regime without imperiling the mission itself. And even that’s a gamble.