Victory by Blockade or War

Peloni

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0. Wikipedia

Trump’s decision to extend the ceasefire has been met with criticism and ridicule, but there is a real potential of this policy bringing about the victory which has remained elusive over the course of a month of war.

Notably, Trump doesn’t need to knock Iran out as he promised to do to achieve such a victory. All he has to do is to continue to starve them out. The blockade is costing Iran about $500 million a day. This is not a sustainable financial loss, and Iran’s financial flow from the Persian Gulf defines the distinction between the regime’s survival and its fall. Consequently, Trump knows he now controls Iran’s economic lifeline via the blockade, and he is keeping the flow of money sealed tightly off. So extending the ceasefire, without offering a new deadline, gives the Iranians no way to save face, while forcing them to slowly implode from within by starving them out. Meanwhile, with Mojtaba Khamenei having been named as his father’s successor while being either incapacitated or actually dead, factions within the regime have begun to vie for dominance in the resulting power vacuum in Tehran. By giving Iran time thru a ceasefire extension, Trump is acting to increase the internal pressure from the blockade to further expose and mature this fracture within Iran’s elites. The fact that there is no deadline in the ceasefire extension offers the factions no expectation as to how long they have to hold out before something changes, thus increasing the psychological pressure on the individuals involved. So Trump isn’t desperate for a deal. He is looking to try to achieve by blockade what failed to be gained by a month of war.  An unending ceasefire with the blockade in place also provides Trump with the element of surprise if he should choose to strike Iran today, tomorrow, next week or next month, ie Iran can’t prepare for a deadline which isn’t stated.

We know the Iranians are strongest at negotiations, and that they also pretend a sense of being impervious to war. Hence, what Trump has done right now is to hold them in a position of being denied both negotiations and the projection of being unconquerable by forcing them to stew in silence as their real weakness, financial isolation, grows stronger with each tick of the clock, never knowing if the next second will see their fracturing regime implode or an Israeli missile strike their new leadership dead. It may prove to be a very effective strategy, and the Iranian chorus, from the press to Carlson to the Europeans to the UN to China and Russia, are simultaneously denied their moment of chastising Trump as the war monger as he sits with his promise of war unfulfilled. Recalling that victory is actually not a military achievement, but rather a political one, the gambit of a potentially unending ceasefire with the blockade in place has the potential of bringing about victory via the implosion of the regime, without the need of necessarily delivering the crushing blow on Iran’s energy and transportation systems.

Notably, the potential of finally taking out these assets still remain firmly within Trump’s grasp of being eliminated at any moment, and with Iran attacking tankers trying to run the blockade in the past few hours, he may well choose to do exactly that.  Yet, while recalling that the purpose of eliminating the energy and transportation infrastructure was intended to strike an irreversible blow to Iran’s economic situation, Trump might achieve a similar outcome (albeit a reversible rather than irreversible blow) by simply holding the blockade in place.  Simultaneously, Iran still holds the opportunity to eat crow and submit to Trump’s terms while entering into the latest hudna to save the regime, but this is clearly more and more unlikely to materialize.  So all options are still on the table, with the ultimate goal of achieving victory via regime collapse being a very real possibility if the regime does not agree to Trump’s demands.