Trump Cannot Ignore the Strait

All the doomer talk about Trump already having lost the war with Iran is premature. 

It is a narrative being pushed using a steady drumbeat to turn anti-Trump wishcasting into a reality by making Trump’s resumption of hostilities impossible, and it is certainly possible that it will work. Politics is the art of persuasion, and it would be easy enough to turn a possibility into a fait accompli. 

But, as yet, it is not a fact. Trump has accomplished most of his goals, but not all of them. It is unlikely that Iran can reconstitute its nuclear program quickly and easily. While the Iranians retain both the enriched uranium and the knowledge of how to build a nuclear weapon, it does not retain the industrial capacity to do so any time soon. 

That has been destroyed, or at least the complex system of industries necessary has been. While the media has glossed over the massive destruction of military and industrial targets that have been destroyed, it remains the case that the destruction occurred. The Narrative™ can accomplish a lot, but building nukes is not one of them. 

On the other hand, Trump’s critics appear to be right about a couple of things, and they are quite important. First, while it is absurd to argue that Iran has become more radicalized than it was before—I mean, c’mon, its eschatology included the destruction of Israel and the West for 47 years, embodied by the “Death to America” chants. 

But it is remains true that the heart of the regime, the IRGC, is now even more entrenched as the dominant power in Iran. It nominally serves under a Supreme Leader, but that Supreme Leader is Weekend at Bernie’s “alive” and in charge. 

And even more importantly, however degraded its military capabilities, it retains enough to maintain a firm grip on the Strait of Hormuz, and hence has an outsized power over the world economy. 

There’s new information being shared in the intelligence community indicating that the IRGC is using the ceasefire window to carry out operations that tighten its grip on this critical choke point, I’m told.

We have reached out to shipping companies to see if they paid the fee…

— Trey Yingst (@TreyYingst) April 10, 2026

There’s new information being shared in the intelligence community indicating that the IRGC is using the ceasefire window to carry out operations that tighten its grip on this critical choke point, I’m told. 

We have reached out to shipping companies to see if they paid the fee to pass. Only a handful of vessels have transited the Strait since the ceasefire began.

If Trump, and, let’s face it, the West, allows this state of affairs to continue indefinitely, Iran will be strengthened as a world power, even as its economy and society continue to decline. These two things are totally compatible, as the persistence of creaky regimes shows. Iran needs just enough military capability to hold the Strait hostage, which is not much. Civilian ships do not eagerly risk destruction, and insurers will impose high costs or make it impossible to take the risk. 

A military solution is much harder than you would think. The conflict over the Red Sea with the Houthis showed that, and even the Ukraine war provides similar lessons. A difficult-to-detect and intercept drone can destroy a tank, and thus, certainly cripple a ship’s ability to transit the Strait. And fighting in the Strait is much harder than in Yemen, due to the mountainous terrain in which it is a trivial matter to hide things. 

In other words, we have to make the IRGC WANT to open the Strait to the free flow of traffic, and if we don’t, the Iranians will succeed in breaking up the current world order and holding the world’s economy hostage. 

Winning wars requires breaking the enemy’s will or destroying it. World War I, as with most wars, ended when one belligerent gave up. German troops were still inside France at the war’s end, but its leadership conceded defeat because the will to fight was lost. World War II ended with the complete destruction of Germany, and with Japan’s will to fight gone. We all know what our leaders feared—a million dead in the Japanese islands, if the Japanese had not cried uncle. We broke their will, not their ability to fight. 

We haven’t broken the IRGC’s will to fight, nor have we rendered them completely incapable of imposing costs on the world. The latter would be nearly impossible with the IRGC in power and defiant, so we must break their will or end their regime, or both. 

Leaving the IRGC in control of the Strait is not a viable option. I assume that Trump and his security advisors know that. We can afford to have an open Strait and a mostly intact IRGC, hoping they become a more normal military dictatorship. That would be unpalatable, but consistent with US security. 

The status quo is not. The US really would be weakened on the world stage. Trump cannot stop here and be seen as anything but a loser,  which I am certain is unacceptable to him. 

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