Trump can still win the Iran war

UnHerd  |  Edward Luttwak

President Donald Trump is facing mounting frustration five months into the war in Iran as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps maintains its grip on Tehran. A loosely worded memorandum of understanding negotiated in Pakistan inadvertently triggered the conflict by prompting unprecedented Iranian sovereignty claims over the entire Persian Gulf and demanding transit fees.

To counter these maritime disruptions, the United States enforced a total embargo on oil exports from Kharg Island and Jask, collapsing the rial and restricting military imports from China. This economic strangulation has severely degraded funding for regional proxies, including Hezbollah and the Houthi militia, who now threaten the Bab-El-Mandeb strait and global energy prices. While Washington currently targets infrastructure, the regime's true vulnerability lies in its leadership. Leveraging Israeli targeting capabilities to eliminate top commanders offers a direct path to ending the conflict without deploying American ground forces to the Gulf.

Comment

Disrupting crude flows from the Kharg Island terminal directly starves the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of the off-budget revenue required to fund its regional operations. This financial denial forces the Quds Force to ration cash transfers to Yemen's Houthi movement, directly impacting their maritime interdiction capabilities in the Red Sea. While economic attrition degrades these proxy networks, it does not alter the core decision-making of Tehran's ruling clerical-military oligarchy. Consequently, the regime's strategic cohesion remains tied to the physical survival of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps command echelon rather than the preservation of national infrastructure.

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