Those are all manageable knowns. That lawn’s been getting mowed for years. Does it suck? Absolutely it does. Is it ideal? Far from it. But is it manageable? Grudgingly, yes. In a frictionless vacuum, eliminating all of that would be a wonderful thing. But I’m not talking about aspirational, I’m talking about achievable. If America were going to successfully bomb and regime change its way out of this predicament, we would have seen that already. They tried and were not successful. Iran has demonstrated that their ability to asymmetrically threaten major global trade flows is a very, very potent weapon. Their ability to cause major damage to energy facilities costing tens of billions of dollars and taking years to rebuild is also very, very potent. Iran has minimal ability to diredtly physically harm the U.S., but they have succesfully demonstrated the vulnerability of U.S. economic and diplomatic interests. That’s all at least as important as tangible military assets. I’d argue even more so.
And so we see an effective stalemate, where Iran can continue to make this all suck far too much for the “keep bombing” approach to be worth it… Because “keep bombing” will likely not succeed in addressing the threats to SoH shipping nor to targeted strikes on key energy infrastructure.
So, taking the facts as they actually are, what are the tolerable outcomes from among the reasonably possible options? That menu of options may actually be less good than was the case months ago before this started, because Iran has removed a lot of doubt about the harm it can cause- and physical oil inventories are critically low in Asia, and just a month away from being so in Europe. Given their current strategy, Iran’s leverage is not decreasing with the passage of time. It may be increasing.
