On Tuesday, Aug. 25, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. Navy has removed or detonated every Iranian mine in the international waters of the Strait of Hormuz. Tankers are moving again, gas prices should finally start to ease and Washington will be tempted to exhale. That would be a mistake. It took the most powerful navy on Earth six months to undo Tehrans damage to the strait. The 60-day negotiating window produced nothing, Iran’s foreign ministry said the deadline “essentially has no relevance,” and the regime that just lost this round is already winding the next clock.
I know that clock. My family lived under it before we fled Iran, a Jewish family that watched the revolution turn our homeland into a place where we could no longer safely exist.
Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and the rest of the regime leadership are not trying to beat the American military; they are trying to outlast the American taxpayer, and the regime is banking its survival on exactly that.
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A year after Operation Midnight Hammer and the 12-Day War showed the world what American power can do in a matter of days, the American publics worst fear is materializing anyway: a drawn-out conflict. The strait may be reopening, but the squeeze of the past six months reached pocketbooks nationwide, midterm elections are approaching and Washington is debating how, and how fast, to prosecute this war.
The longer this war runs, the more the Iranian regime gains. The only question that matters is whether America fights the war Tehran designed or the war America can win. Since 1979, the dictatorship has run the same play, which U.S. officials have long as “deception, defiance and delay.” Buy time, bleed the adversary, survive to rebuild. The arithmetic of this war was built for that play. Tehran fields a Shahed suicide drone for about $20,000; America answers with Patriot interceptors at roughly $4 million each. Iran maintains the capacity to manufacture an estimated 10,000 drones a month, has begun rebuilding its missile facilities, and is moving valuable assets underground.
Every truce and every pause becomes a rearmament window for Iran. Tehran is not waiting alone. The regime signed a 20-year strategic partnership with Russia, is receiving more than a thousand tons of missile-making chemicals from China, and collaborates on missile technology with North Korea.
Each arrangement lowers what it costs the ayatollah to keep firing, which means our gravest geopolitical rivals are helping underwrite the missiles aimed at us. The rest of the bill lands on Irans neighbors, as the regime strikes airports, shipping and commercial districts across the Gulf states, from Dubai to Doha, to spread the pain and build pressure for American concessions.
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A U.N. fact-finding mission found Iran responsible for the systematic rape and brutalization of women. Irans laws make homosexuality punishable by death, and the regime persecutes ethnic and religious minorities as policy. My family was one of those minorities. My mother pulled my brother and me out of Iran because being Jewish there had become dangerous, and she rebuilt our lives in America from nothing.
In January, after a nationwide uprising, the
