Er … maybe Donald Trump? Repeatedly?
Nevertheless, this Truth Social post suggests that Trump learned his lesson, and a lot faster than a couple of his predecessors. ABC News reported earlier yesterday that Trump had again sent diplomatic signals to get a negotiated end to the Hormuz crisis. The IRGC had spent most of yesterday threatening their usual mother of all responses, but those empty threats have usually accompanied their own attempts to get other Gulf states to intervene with Trump on their behalf.
The time for deals has passed, Trump posted last night:
Why haven't the Iranian people risen up yet? That question got some blowback for a couple of reasons. The Iranian people are disarmed, first off, and their oppressors control nearly all the weapons. They tried an uprising in January; the regime massacred tens of thousands of them to keep control. The US did not directly intervene until six weeks later, and the war increased the internal enforcement of regime rule.
Second and perhaps more important, the constant attempts by the US to cut a deal with the regime undercut any momentum that the Iranian opposition might generate. Not to fulfill Godwin's Law, but the clear parallel here is 1930s Europe and the constant deals offered to Hitler by Britain and France. The German military needed Hitler to suffer one defeat to seize power, and the old Prussian clique was prepared to do it, but Hitler kept getting concessions from the Versailles powers. By the time of the Munich humiliation and the subsequent seizure of Czechoslovakia six months later, Hitler was unstoppable thanks to attempts to appease Hitler back to peace.
Why would people risk their lives at the moment the US might cut a deal with their oppressors? This has been the problem with previous administrations that tried to negotiate with the Islamist terror regime in Tehran. Barack Obama wanted his Munich moment so bad that he backed the regime during the 2009 uprising by recognizing the ridiculously corrupt election in Iran that year. He spent the next six years chasing the JCPOA that Iran entirely ignored anyway. And Joe Biden wanted desperately to get the mullahs to sign back onto that useless JCPOA in order to declare that he had achieved peace in his time, too.
In that sense, Trump has learned his lesson a lot faster than his predecessors did. If he's serious about this, as opposed to making this into a negotiating tactic, then Iran has a very big problem. Duane will go into more detail in our next post on this point, but the siege and traded "kinetic actions" favor the US. Iran has no blue-water navy, no effective air force or air defenses, and the strategic damage done in March to its military-industrial complex will set it back decades. Its currency has collapsed, and the only asset that the IRGC still has is Iran's oil – which they can't trade any longer, thanks to a relatively cheap blockade that Trump can maintain for months or longer.
Actually, it sounds like Trump wants a different kind of “trade” with Iran. He's trading tankers, and again, Trump has a lot more pieces on the board:
Why it matters: This is the first time the U.S. military has struck Iranian tankers in retaliation for Iranian attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz — rather than to prevent them from violating the naval blockade.
A U.S. official said the move was part of a new "tanker for tanker" policy approved by President Trump to further deter Iranian attacks on tankers that move through the strait.
Driving the news: U.S. officials said around 100 targets were attacked during Tuesday's strikes.
The Iranian government tankers were anchored off Iran's coast north of the U.S. naval blockade line. U.S. drones launched missiles that hit their engine rooms.
Among the targets were Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) air defense sites, radar systems, mine-laying capabilities, communications sites, anti-ship cruise missile launchers and attack drone launchers, U.S. officials said.
This is an even bigger loss to Iran than just the replacement costs of the tankers. Iran has been forced to store its crude oil on its tanker fleet to prevent the necessity of capping their wells, which would potentially cripple their main industry for a generation. The rest of the world has the capacity to replace these tankers; Iran cannot afford to do that now, even if the blockade ends. Every disabled tanker also delays the recovery of their income stream when the siege does end, too.
Let's hope that Trump means what he posted last night. No one should want a deal with the radical Islamist terrorists that currently have Iran in their grip. The Iranian people will rise up when they can feel confident that the rest of the world will not come to rescue this regime from itself.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are once again respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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