LET THE THING BE PRESSED.

The Memorandum of Understanding is a dead letter, kinetic actions that might not involve the United States or Israeli forces, and Dmitri Bolt advises Our President, "Iran Is Already Begging for a Deal. Don't Give Them One."  I can understand Our President's hope to leave those Iranians who are not mad Moslems, such as the ones who took advantage of the weekend of mourning to go to the beach, with the vestiges of a civilian infrastructure once the mullahs bug out.

After two or three months of this phony peace process, perhaps he's right, end the endless faculty meeting and take the dual use infrastructure away.

Despite a season's worth of wishful thinking on the part of Our President, Noah Rothman argues that Iran's position isn't terribly advantageous.

Despite Iran’s efforts to harass commercial shipping interests, which have been ongoing since high-tempo combat operations ceased in early April, energy markets are no longer negotiating on Iran’s behalf. Oil supplies “have recovered,” the [Wall Street] Journal notes, and future prices had been approaching “near prewar levels.” Moreover, oil producers are investing heavily in “alternative routes and overseas storage with new urgency to get around the chokepoint.”

Trump has made the welcome decision to withdraw the waivers that allowed Iran to sell its oil and petroleum derivatives on the open market for U.S. dollars. Suddenly, Iran’s “ghost fleet” of tankers is once again illicit. China will still purchase Iranian oil, but at a black-market discount. Meanwhile, responsible economic actors will not risk engaging in visible commercial relations with Iran if they understand that the rug might be pulled out from under them at any moment. Thus, even if Trump changes his mind, Iran’s provocations have probably cut off what was once a promisingly lucrative revenue stream.

It would be hard to argue with a straight face that Iran’s position is particularly advantageous. Once an inviolable taboo, U.S. military strikes on Iranian targets inside the Islamic Republic have become so regularized that they barely even make headlines. The reliable flow of capital toward the path of least resistance ensures that the strait will gradually lose its value as a chokepoint the more that Iran throttles access to it. Tehran’s sanctions-evasion networks in the Gulf region are in tatters, and its continued ballistic missile attacks on its neighbors are unlikely to compel their cooperation.

The president’s premature peace overtures have contributed unnecessarily to the difficulties he will face in his ongoing efforts to force Iran into compliance with his dictates. But he is not without tools at his disposal. He can restore the blockade, recommit to Operation Economic Fury (targeting, in particular, Chinese financial interests with commercial ties to Iran), and continue to demonstrate, in escalating stages, that his threats to return to full-scale war are not bluster.

Trump knows this. But pulling the trigger on these options would commit him to a long campaign. Seeing it through to even a modestly successful conclusion would require a level of patience the president has not yet demonstrated.

Perhaps not yet, but sometimes the speed of business is slower than the speed of politics.

Trump is fully in favour of medium- and long-term methods to circumvent the effectively Iran-controlled Strait of Hormuz, particularly given the relative ineffectiveness of the short-term measures available once Tehran's blockade was in place. The 'Southern Highway' corridor that hugged the coast of Oman and was actively backed by U.S. and Gulf allies proved slightly more effective at reducing market panic than it was at restoring the number of oil tankers in transit. During peak operations early in the blockade, the corridor allowed roughly a dozen vessels per weekend to transit, rising to around 119 ships by late June -- still a long way off the historical 700 weekly transits normal for the waterway. Similarly taking the edge off market panic but still representing a fraction of what was required over the medium- and long-term to keep oil prices from spiralling, were the land-based routes for trucks carrying oil through Iraq and Syria. Iraq's case is instructive, as it managed to move around 500 trucks on average a day into Syria at the height of the blockade, with each one carrying around 250 barrels of crude oil -- totalling 125,000 barrels per day (bpd). That compared to the previous 3.3-3.4 million bpd it moved through the Strait of Hormuz before the blockade. More significant options were also used alongside these makeshift measures, with one being the capacity expansion of Saudi Arabia's East-West Pipeline (1,200 km long, moving crude from eastern oil fields across the Arabian Peninsula to the Red Sea port of Yanbu) to 7 million bpd for a while. However, Yanbu's marine terminal and domestic refining create a bottleneck, capping actual export throughput at around 4.5 million bpd. Another option was the UAE's Habshan–Fujairah Pipeline (360 km long, linking Abu Dhabi's fields directly to the port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman), which has seen capacity increase to its maximum level of 1.8 million bpd.

Such investments, some of which have the potential to be expanded, have the dual effect of attenuating Iranian leverage over oil movements out of the Arabian Gulf, and freeing up naval ships from enforcing free passage to blockading cargo in and out of Iran.

These measures demonstrate that Washington and its allies are no longer relying on short-term crisis management but are instead building a permanent, multi-route architecture that makes any future blockade far less economically damaging. Iran will retain the ability to disrupt regional shipping, but its leverage over global oil flows is being structurally eroded with every kilometre of new pipeline, port expansion, and corridor redesign. The long?term objective is clear: ensure that the next Hormuz crisis does not become a global one.

Furthermore, any ship not trapped in the Gulf is a ship available to load cargo at other ports, something that no doubt appeals to Our President's mercantilist instincts.