Hanson opens by naming the whiplash everyone's feeling watching this thing unfold:
"One day, the United States seems ready to unleash a Curtis LeMay-style devastating bombing campaign of Iran. The next, it appears trapped in endless haggling with Iranian dissimulators."
OK, that's fair. But he doesn't stop at the confusion — he pushes straight through it to the numbers nobody in the mainstream press seems interested in running. Start with the money, which Hanson says the headlines have completely buried:
"The confusion obscures the continuing effects of the embargoes, sanctions, blockade, and financial isolation imposed on Iran. Together, they are costing the theocracy more than $400 million a day in lost revenue, money that it can ill afford to lose. By haggling, Iran
...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for Jews Zionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol...
believes it can run out the clock until the midterms, but it may be only prolonging its own miserable situation."
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believes it can run out the clock until the midterms, but it may be only prolonging its own miserable situation."
Four hundred million dollars a day. Every single day this drags on, that's the number ticking against Tehran, not against us.
Then there's the airpower math, which is where Hanson's column really earns its photons:
In sum, the United States and its allies have some 1,300 late-model combat aircraft in the region. They should therefore be able to hit Iran hard for years to come if it resumes drone and missile attacks against its rivals
.He goes on from there.
Iran's problems will not end when the United States declares victory and sends most of its forces home. The regime has lost a half-century and half a trillion dollars in military and nuclear investment. Until the United States lifts its sanctions and embargoes, Iran cannot rearm. And if it eventually does rearm and again tries to supply its Arab terrorist clients in its "ring of fire" around Israel, its destitute people will grow furious at a disgraced and humiliated regime for diverting the nation's wealth abroad.
Sit with that 1,300 figure for a second, because Hanson breaks down exactly where it comes from: the Gulf states alone can field more than 700 combat aircraft — F-15s, F-16s, F/A-18s, Rafales, Mirages, Tornados. Israel adds another 300, including late-model F-35s. U.S. bases in the region hold roughly 300 more, F-22s and F-35s among them, and that's before you count a single carrier air wing.
Iran, by comparison, currently has no effective combat aircraft, and no functioning air defenses left to speak of. That's not a fair fight. That's not even a fight — that's a permanent ceiling on Iran's ability to project power, regardless of who's negotiating what this week.
Hanson correctly points out that Hormuz may only need about a year, maybe two, of continued naval support before other avenues of oil delivery come fully online and existing pipelines finish their expansion, bypassing whatever leverage Iran imagines it still holds over the strait. In Hanson's own words: Iran's blockade attempts have "already accelerated the expansion of existing pipelines and the construction of new ones that will bypass the strait and connect the oil fields directly to the Gulf of Oman, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean."
Read that twice. Iran tried to weaponize a chokepoint, and the practical result is the rest of the region building its way around that chokepoint, permanently. That's not a threat Iran is managing. That's a threat Iran is actively engineering itself out of, even if it steadfastly refuses to see it.
"Iran is losing whether it is being bombed, sanctioned, or embargoed—or all three." Its ultimate fate, he adds, now rests entirely with an administration that hasn't yet decided exactly how far to push the advantage it's already sitting on.
One more thing worth adding, since it came up in the comments on my original piece, and I think it's worth pulling into this column instead of leaving it buried down there. A reader's exchange got me thinking about the 1978 war film Force 10 From Navarone, and I'd suggest it's a better model for what Trump's actually doing than anyone's given him credit for.
Without spoiling the whole plot for anyone who hasn't seen it: The mission at the center of that film doesn't rely on brute-force demolition. It relies on identifying exactly where a massive structure is already under unbearable strain, then applying one small, precisely placed charge to a load-bearing point — letting the structure's own weight finish the job the explosives merely started.
That's the strategy playing out against Iran right now, whether the administration ever says so out loud or not. Much as it would make some folks feel good to crush the mullahs instantly. Much as a formal surrender with all the trimmings would be desirable, the fact is, it's simply superfluous.
In the simplest of terms, you don't need to flatten a regime that's already buckling under half a trillion dollars in squandered investment, a devastated air force, a strait it can't actually hold closed, and $400 million a day bleeding out of its own treasury. You just need to find the load-bearing point and apply pressure precisely there. The conditions for collapse are already built into the structure. The small explosion — a strike here, a sanction there, an embargo tightened at exactly the right moment — is just the trigger. Everything after that is physics, and time, not politics. You just need to sit back and await developments.
So, as I said a couple days ago, Trump has already won.
| Related from Red State: Economic Crash-Out: New Report About IRGC Shows Just How Much Trouble Iran Is In |