Last night's speech from Donald Trump went long on election-interference claims, as John and David have covered, but said nearly nothing about the re-escalation against Iran. The war got only a single sentence, assuring the country that we are "winning big," and that those results would become apparent "very, very shortly." Trump aimed almost the entirety of his speech at China's election espionage and the "vulnerabilities" that he wants addressed through the SAVE America Act.
Right now, though, the American public is paying for the war at the gas pumps, and it may want some clarity on how Trump will ensure those big wins. The strategy and intensity have clearly changed over the last week or so since Trump declared Iranian regime leaders as "scum" and talks worthless. It appears, as the Wall Street Journal suggests, that Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have returned to an earlier warning from Trump that commentators dubbed the Bridge and Power Day.
Or, perhaps, we can call it Infrastructure Week:
The U.S. struck multiple bridges in Iran on Thursday in an effort to cut off supply routes to a port city and naval base in the Strait of Hormuz that Iran uses to attack ships and project power, according to a senior U.S. official.
Several attacks on bridges were reported in and around the port city of Bandar Abbas overnight Thursday, and highways connecting Bandar Abbas to nearby provinces were declared closed, according to Iran’s state broadcaster IRIB.
Bandar Abbas is home to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base and is critical to Iran’s ability to project power in the waterway and throughout the Persian Gulf. The U.S. has pounded it with strikes in recent days, and it attacked an Iranian submarine and ship facility there with sea drones earlier this week.
Trump warned Iran at the beginning of April that the next phase of the US-Israeli strategy would target dual-use power and transportation infrastructure. That pushed the Iranians to seek a pause with the Pakistanis as mediators. When Iran balked at compliance, Trump raised the "Bridge and Power Day" threat while opting instead for the naval blockade as an incremental escalation to Iran's attempts to close the Strait of Hormuz. In late May, Trump again threatened to escalate to targeting vital infrastructure, which forced Iran to agree to the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).
Trump's silence on this, including last night, may be the best indicator that he has seriously changed strategy back to a full offensive. Over the past three months, Trump has used the verbal threats effectively enough to produce performative cooperation from Iran. However, as we predicted and as events have proven, the IRGC will only perform cooperation, not actually engage in it. With Iran's multiple and serial violations of the MOU upending his plan to get oil prices back to prewar levels, Trump warned that he was done talking, a warning intended as much for Pakistan, Turkey, and Qatar as it was to the regime in Tehran.
Instead, Trump has snapped the naval blockade back into place, but this time has extended the concept to land routes. The US has struck the Iranians' main rail system for trade, which will shut down nearly all external sources of income again, this time more completely. Now we have begun targeting transportation infrastructure that supplies their coastal assets used to interfere with shipping through Hormuz. It may not be long before we start striking power-generation systems that support these facilities, including in Tehran, with special attention paid to heat signatures where leadership may run generators to keep their systems operating when the grids collapse.
In response, Iran claims they will step up attacks on shipping through the Strait. That won't be tenable for long, and the US has long-term strategies in place to reduce the strategic value of Hormuz, including with the new government in Iraq:
Chevron intends to sign preliminary deals Friday to invest in two Iraqi oil fields and will join a consortium of investors exploring the construction of a pipeline to connect Iraq’s oil patch with the Syrian coast.
Iraq and other Middle East oil producers are scrambling for alternatives to the Strait of Hormuz, which Tehran has sought to shut down and put under its control, triggering a U.S. military response. About 20% of the world’s oil transited the waterway before the Iran war began.
Gulf governments are pouring billions of dollars into new pipelines, rail corridors and energy storage hubs to bypass the strait, in what is set to become one of the most durable outcomes of the war.
The deals with Chevron are part of a broader push by new Iraqi Prime Minister Ali Al Zaidi to shore up investment from the U.S. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is scheduled to host a U.S.-Iraq Business Summit on Friday in Washington with Zaidi, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and others where it says $60 billion in deals will be signed.
Ali Al Zaidi would not sign such agreements unless the US made it clear that it intends to eliminate the threat from Iran that has created a semi-occupation of eastern Iraq, including Baghdad. It also would not align with Syria unless the US guaranteed that the al-Sharaa government remained firmly opposed to the IRGC regime. And the only way the US can guarantee those conditions is to either remove the IRGC junta or completely collapse its infrastructure and threat profile in the region.
In other words, it looks as though Bridge and Power Day has finally arrived, or at least Infrastructure Week has begun. Trump has to see it through to the end for these other strategic alliances to work, rather than keep trying to cut deals that leave the terrorists in charge of Tehran. Has Trump learned that lesson?
Editor's Note: For decades, former presidents have been all talk and no action. Now, Donald Trump is eliminating the threat from Iran once and for all.
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