BLOCKADING HATTERAS INLET IS HARDER.

I allude, of course, to Gideon Welles's Anaconda Plan, which ultimately strangled the rebellion.  It took four years to implement, because getting control of the Mississippi River and the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico America wasn't easy.  Note how in four years, Vladimir Putin hasn't been able to do something similar with Ukraine.

The cease-fire that Our President agreed to might be worrisome for Israel.  Michael Oren frets,

The disaster scenario is painfully clear. After pledging to bomb Iran’s strategic infrastructure and energy assets and destroy its civilization, President Trump backtracked and agreed to a two-week ceasefire that left Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz along with ballistic capabilities. Their regional proxies are far from eliminated. The regime keeps its stockpile of over 970 lbs of highly enriched uranium, enough to make eleven nuclear bombs, and retains the right to enrich.

In such a situation, the United States is unlikely to have the leverage to achieve all or even some of its original war goals in the talks. Given public opinion in the U.S., it is difficult to imagine America renewing the war after the two-week truce.

Rather, the Americans are likely to find themselves negotiating Iran’s terms for peace, including guarantees against future attacks against the Islamic Republic and the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Middle East. At most, a deal could be reached in which, in exchange for exporting the enriched stockpile abroad, Iran would receive sanctions relief.

That's a worst-case scenario, and, yes, professionals must not downplay worst-case scenarios.  Right now, the over-under on the truce lasting two minutes looks less favorable than the over-under on the Milwaukee Bucks dressing twelve tonight.  As Hot Air's "Captain Ed" Morrissey quips, "Perhaps Donald Trump's latest statement is meant to paraphrase a line from the most worthwhile Star Wars film: You have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further."

That passage offers a transition to Mr Oren's more favorable scenario.

But there is also a hopeful reality in which Trump is using the two-week truce to rotate and replace his exhausted troops who have been serving in a war zone and to prove, once again, Iran’s intransigence. There is the hope that the President will not give in to the Iranian demand to impose a ceasefire on our northern front as well and that Israel can restore basic security to the Galilee. The hopeful scenario holds that, even if it survives this war, the Iranian regime has been so undermined that it will eventually collapse and be replaced by a peace-seeking government.

Whichever scenario or combination of scenarios ensues, Israel must prepare for the ongoing confrontation with Iran and its proxies. This means stabilizing our new borders—the Yellow Line in Gaza and the Litani River in Lebanon—and giving our reserves a desperately needed rest. It means strengthening our relations with the United States while also cultivating new alliances globally. It means healing our internal rifts, above all the Haredi controversy which is tearing us apart. And we must harness our technology to produce new ways of defending our skies and our land.

Free countries have their Culture Wars in the open, whether it's boys on girls' teams or the influence of Orthodox Judaism.  Unfree countries have all sorts of tensions simmering: think Iraq after Saddam Hussein or Yugoslavia after Josip "John Alexander Karlson" Tito or Iran after the mullahs substituted their repression for that of the Shah.  But heightening the contradictions might be incidental to Donald Trump losing patience. which Captain Ed suggests is a real possibility, and soon.

If Iran tries to stall or renegotiate the cease-fire, it will be a very short round of negotiations. The B-52s could be back in the air by this time tomorrow, along with other sorties, perhaps more engaged in the Strait of Hormuz and Iran's ability to export oil. The US staged demonstration strikes on Kharg Island just before the cease-fire went into effect, and that apparently pushed the regime toward negotiations.

Abbas Araghchi should understand the message. He tried blustering his way with Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner in the talks that took place on February 28, when Araghchi told Witkoff that there was nothing we could do about Iran's nuclear-weapons program. That ended badly for Ali Khamenei and most of the regime's top IRGC leadership.

Two weeks is about the right time to rotate a fresh aircraft carrier or two and a submarine or two with full battle loads into the region.  The Captain continues, "The Gulf states will not stand for a deal that doesn't impose severe limits on Iran's missile and drone capacities after experiencing the threat they represent first-hand in this war. Neither will Israel, not even if Trump is inclined to push that issue off – and there is no indication he is so inclined at all."  No.  Israel's war is not over.  "America has the luxury of walking away from conflict in Iran. Israelis aren’t so lucky."  That's Haviv Gur in The (Not Detroit) Free Press, recognizing that the interests of the United States, the Gulf Arab states, and Israel align but are not congruent.

Until Tuesday, Israel and America were fighting an overlapping war with almost entirely overlapping interests. But the overlap wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t going to last. The two countries’ interests are not identical. Israel is threatened enough to be willing to see this through to the end of the regime, even at great short-term cost to Iranians and Israelis—and global energy markets. Israel is small, within missile range, and thus highly sensitive to the kind of annihilationist rhetoric and ideology in which the Iranian regime traffics. This is why support for the war, even after six weeks of Iranian missile fire, remains surprisingly high among Israelis. The Iranian threat, though much diminished by the war, still looms large.

But America is none of those things: not small, not close, and unimpressed by Iranian religious rhetoric. America’s democratically elected leaders are far more sensitive to the midterm voter’s economic pain than to the ayatollahs’ promise of never-ending redemptive violence.

This is a good thing, of course. It’s how the world should work.

But it can make it harder to sustain a serious military effort to bring down a bad actor on the world stage.

Barely a day before the ceasefire announcement, Israeli sources were telling Israeli journalists that Benjamin Netanyahu was advocating a major expansion of the war to include Iran’s economic base. It’s not an easy decision, but it’s a rational one. The Iranian economy is not a normal economy. It is a hijacked one, almost entirely bent to the same “revolutionary” religious cause as everything else in Iran.

Those targeting packages are still on desks somewhere, and one of those desks might be the Resolute Desk.  That, though, leads us toward the focus of my post, which I hinted at in the title.

And Iran retains the one capability every analyst has warned about: the ability to hold the global oil supply hostage. For all their efforts, the Israelis and Americans were not able to neutralize the drone and missile threat in the Strait of Hormuz.

As the ceasefire talks get underway, Iran is trying to make the most of this last piece of leverage left to it. It now demands the right to charge fees for transit of Hormuz, imposing a permanent cost for the war.

And even more dramatically, it plans to keep the strait shuttered long enough to force one further concession from the Americans: reining in the Israelis.

Yes, if you believe the official Iranian (and Democrat) spin that Donald Trump chickened out.  He might have taken the meeting to heighten the contradictions among what's left of Iran's senior leadership, which might have almost as much trouble as the Milwaukee Bucks at dressing twelve.  Let's see what the weekend brings.

Mr Gur misses an important point about chokepoints.  He notes, "And the second lesson: the vulnerability of choke points and energy infrastructures."  Power Line's Bill Glahn asks the obvious question.

What am I missing here? Can all of these Iran “experts” be so completely wrong? They tell me Iran “controls” the exit to the Persian Gulf through a multi-million-dollar exit fee (payable in crypto). But how are the ships going to get back? Is there a back way in?

Iran has no navy, so how are they going to get the empty ships back into the Persian Gulf to reload?

All of those ships leaving the Gulf will be repurposed to move Venezuelan crude.

That's a good question.  There are currently at least 800 ships stuck west of the strait, and their owners are interested in getting them out.  There aren't many ships heading in.  There are work-arounds for crude oil.  "Saudi oil exports via Red Sea steady despite pipeline attack."  Mr Glahn suggests there are incentives to build more pipelines.  "Two more pipelines and Iran is out of business, forever."  That's easier said than done, and scant consolation for Pacific Rim countries whose loaded tankers will have farther to sail.

Alan Dershowitz, who might have studied his Gideon Welles, wants to extend the argument.

The United States should declare that if Iran were again to close the straits to some ships, the U.S. would close it to all ships.

In other words, Iran has the power to decide to close the straits, but it does not have the power to keep it open to selectively itself and its friends.

The U.S. has the power, through a military blockade, to close the straits to all shipping, including Iran's.

Such a total closure would require all the shippers of Gulf oil to find alternative ways of getting it to its customers.

Such efforts are already underway.

Closing the straits to Iranian-approved ships unless Iran opens it to all ships would raise the price of oil in the short term, but lower and stabilize it in the long term, as oil producing companies find alternative routes and deny Iran the power to raise prices by closing one route that accounts for 20% of oil shipments.

That might not play well given the logic of United States election cycles  or the long lead times to build pipelines or build railroads and fleets of tank cars.  On the other hand, depriving the hijackers of Iran's economy of any resources might well end the half-century war they have been waging.

There's another element to the Anaconda Plan that's intriguing, particularly with regard to inbound ships.  If Iranian ports are blockaded, pilots are combatants and ships arriving or leaving either Kharg Island or the port east of the straits subject to interdiction.

Such steps might be more productive than those Niall Ferguson, Richard Haass, and Philip Zelikow outline in "How to Stop Iran from Winning the War."  They consider a blockade as a first step, followed by some sort of "back-channel understanding" concerning the movement of ships from Iranian ports (as if rug merchants can be trusted) and a new convention modelled on the Montreux Convention governing the Hellespont.  (News flash:  Turkey control both sides.  Iran is on the north side only of the Strait of Hormuz.)  They note Our President's interest in some sort of "joint venture," but I suspect that's an Art of the Deal tease.  The last thing I want to see right now is another international agency.  Where is the fleet of Aegis carrying destroyers and cruisers to quarantine the Iranian ports?