LET THE ANACONDA'S COILS TIGHTEN.

In The American Thinker, Heyrsh Abdulrahman, who has foreign policy experience germane to the conflict, notes, "The era of believing the Iranian regime can simply be managed indefinitely appears to be ending, and Washington should not waste the opportunity created by that realization."  It's a lengthy essay, considering several dimensions of the conflict, and it reinforces the Cold Spring Shops position that the current Iranian government ought not have nuclear capabilities, ought not be financing gangbangers masquerading as religious zealots in Asia Minor or beyond, ought respect the status of the Strait of Hormuz as an international waterway, and ought compensate the Gulf Arab states for damages resulting from their unstructured response to the Israeli and United States military campaign.

By all means read his essay in full.  He suggests now is not the time to go wobbly.

Iran today faces growing economic pressure, internal dissatisfaction, and mounting regional setbacks. The image of an unstoppable regional power has weakened. Many of Tehran’s proxy networks remain active, but the regime itself appears more strategically constrained than it did at the height of its influence.

History shows that authoritarian systems often appear durable until pressure exposes deeper internal weakness. Once that process begins, the strategic landscape can change quickly. That does not mean regime collapse is guaranteed or easily achievable. It does mean policymakers should think carefully before relieving pressure at the exact moment Tehran appears increasingly vulnerable.

Critics of a harder approach often warn about escalation, but they rarely explain what the alternative looks like over the long term. A nuclear-threshold Iran with advanced missile capabilities, entrenched proxy networks, and influence across critical regional waterways does not represent stability. It represents a permanent cycle of crisis management.

The United States now faces a choice it postponed for years.

It can pursue another temporary arrangement designed mainly to buy time, or it can use this moment to push for a broader strategic outcome that addresses the underlying source of the problem rather than merely slowing its symptoms.

There may still be debate about tactics. There should be. But the era of believing the Iranian regime can simply be managed indefinitely appears to be ending. And Washington should not waste the opportunity created by that realization.

It might be too late for Congress to take Andrew McCarthy's advice in National Review, "Congress Should Authorize Military Force Against Iran."  And yet, doing so might provide the sort of clarity of mission Our President has so far failed to provide.

President Trump’s dereliction in failing to prepare the nation for war with Iran, and his inconstancy about the war’s objectives — and even regarding whether it is, in fact, a war and whether it is, in fact, ongoing — have predictably had harmful effects. It’s past time for Congress to assert its constitutional power and authorize force, at least to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. No matter what one thinks of how we got here, Iran cannot be allowed to annex a vital global trade route whose closure is hurting Americans.

Because of the administration’s poor messaging, the real good done by American combat operations has been obscured: the significant setbacks to Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions and ballistic missile capabilities, the virtual destruction of its navy and air defenses, and the infliction of economic distress that undermines its capacity to abet its jihadist proxies. To repeat what I’ve said before, politically speaking, a security win can look and feel like a loss if Iran appears to hold the whip hand.

The Strait of Hormuz was open to free international trade on February 28 and, as a result of the war, Iran has closed it. Because Trump failed the basic duty of communicating the national security risks, the American people did not feel a threat from Iran. Now, however, they now feel financial pain inflicted by Iran in what they perceive as a war Trump gratuitously started. The most visible, tangible outcome of the war, as far as most Americans are concerned, is that Iran now dominates the strait. That’s politically catastrophic.

Moreover, it happened because our transactional president, who figures everyone has a price, failed to understand how rabidly a revolutionary Shiite sharia supremacist regime would fight for its own survival. He failed, therefore, to apprehend the high probability that the regime would (a) close the strait, (b) attack its Sunni Islamic neighbors that align with the U.S. and host our military bases, and (c) otherwise escalate the conflict to degrees out of proportion with his own overconfident assumptions.

What comes next could be a return to conflict.  It is possible for the United States, with or without assistance from other naval powers, to secure passage for ships not calling at Iranian ports while keeping ships from proceeding to or departing from Iranian ports.  That might be sufficient to restore something resembling normal commerce in petroleum products and fertilizer from the Gulf Arab countries while continuing to starve the mullahs and heighten the contradictions in what passes for their government.  In The (Not Detroit) Free Press, Aaron MacLean suggests that just might work.

The possibility of the outright end of the ceasefire is very real, in which case the region will need to brace for further rounds of missile and drone attacks from Iran—but the Islamic Republic will also need to brace for what could be a devastating round of strikes on economic and leadership targets by the United States and Israel.

The risk is worth taking. Whatever the pain imposed by the American blockade of Iranian ports, the current leadership of Iran is unlikely to be persuaded to accept American demands regarding its nuclear program and the strait in time for the massive global (and domestic!) economic damage caused by Iran’s closure of the strait to be avoided. The leverage they enjoy through closing the strait needs to be eliminated.

I sense that Our President would just as soon not wreck what remains of Iran's infrastructure, as he still hopes the correlation of forces will favor the people stringing up the remaining mullahs and revolutionary guard thugs and they ought have a basis for rebuilding the country.  In authorizing focused responses to Iranian interference with shipping and channel-clearing operations, he's retaining the option to unleash that wrecking.  The responses of the Gulf Arab states to having the odd missile or drone flipped that way remain to be determined, and I've gotten this deep into this summary without considering the Israeli interest, which is in the mullahs being gone, whether or not Iranian civilians have a country when the dust settles.

Noah Rothman, again in National Review (I limit today's post to material from Trump-skeptical outlets such as National Review and The Free Press deliberately) suggests that the time for forbearance might be passing.

It seems like “bomb the hell out of them” will be necessary. Reopening the strait through force — fraught though such an operation would be — would deprive the IRGC of its last point of leverage over the West. Allowing the remnants of Iran’s military to control the strait would undermine America’s role as the foremost guarantor of global maritime navigation rights and all but ensure that America’s adversaries would reprise Iran’s gambit in the strait. Both Trump and Iran’s decimated leadership are talking tough, but they all need relief from the effects of this blockade — and soon.

And yet, despite the apparently unshakable belief that Donald Trump is only moments away from suing for peace, the president has remained steadfast. Many speculated that Trump would settle for a face-saving end to the conflict — a new Obama-style nuclear deal distinct only insofar as it had Trump’s name on it. The president’s critics presumed that he lacked the stomach for an operation that would put American soldiers and sailors at real risk.

But Trump did not use the cease-fire to wiggle out of the war. Rather, he spent that period conducting the war by other means — both through the blockade and with the inauguration of an economic campaign designed to throttle Iran’s access to illicit revenues abroad. A full-scale effort to reopen the strait would mean the collapse of the cease-fire. As the Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Continetti observed, destroying Iran’s coastal drone and missile teams, sinking fast boats, clearing mines, and providing naval escorts is not without risk. But it can be done. America has done it before.

If a new phase of this conflict is in the offing, the president would be well advised to properly inform the American public of what is coming and the burdens they will be expected to bear. He might even solicit the U.S. public’s support for an initiative that could very well see the Iranian regime neutered. Without the Strait of Hormuz, the Islamic Republic cannot plausibly claim to have secured a strategic victory in this war. Its government is decapitated, its military in tatters, its heavy industry in ruins, and its showpiece nuclear weapons program reduced to rubble. Even if Iran retains nominal control of its highly enriched uranium stockpiles for the time being, it lacks the capacity to enrich further, and it cannot rebuild that program without alerting the West. Reopening the strait would be a real victory for Trump, and he seems content to hold out for it.

Although the cease-fire has been notional almost since its declaration on 8 April, none of the declared combatants have publicly announced it is over, and each country has its own, non-overlapping, reasons for maintaining the fiction that it is in place.  Should additional ships depart safely from the Gulf Arab ports, that might be the limited victory Our President seeks, while the economic pain continues in Iran, and perhaps the fractures among what remains of its leadership.  But as of yesterday, Windward describe shipping activity in the strait as "operationally unstable."

Let's see what next week brings.  Our President still intends to visit China, while Ukraine and Russia have put their spat on pause for a long weekend to remember better days, when they were fraternal socialist partners taking out the fascist beast.