Delcy 2.0
One of two things seems necessarily true, and I invite you to decide for yourself which is more frightening. The White House had a plan to keep the Strait of Hormuz open and that plan failed, or the White House never had a plan.
If you favor the first theory, there’s evidence to back you up. When the Pentagon brass briefed Congress on the first days of the conflict, they admitted that Iran’s kamikaze Shahed drones had proven more disruptive than expected. “They were ill-prepared,” one person at the briefing told Defense News about the administration’s defensive planning—never mind that the U.S. has been regularly sharing information with the global authority in countering Shahed strikes, the Ukrainian military, for four years.
Maybe the White House and its top commanders believed they knew how to prevent Shaheds from harassing the Strait of Hormuz only to learn the hard way that they didn’t. For whatever moronic reason, instead of consulting with the Ukrainians beforehand, they waited until the Strait was under threat and an energy crisis was in motion to begin doing so.
The other theory is that the president was high as a kite on hubris after his success in Caracas and had no plan for the Strait of Hormuz because he believed war with Iran would be Venezuela 2.0. Second verse, same as the first: Neutralize the country’s leader with an awesome show of force and wait for his terrified deputies to sue for peace in hopes of avoiding the same fate. A days-long bombardment of regime installations by the U.S. and Israeli militaries would weaken the enemy’s resolve, Trump may have believed, and bring them to the table before they did anything draconian in retaliation, like effectively closing the Strait.
There’s evidence for the second theory too. Trump’s thinking about the desired endgame in Iran hasn’t been coherent (or even linear, really), ranging from “unconditional surrender” and regime change to finishing off the nation’s nuclear program to degrading its missile capabilities to freedom for the Iranian people. But when he spoke last week to the New York Times, he sounded “enamored” of the Venezuela 2.0 blueprint. “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” he told the paper’s reporters. Days later, in an interview with Axios, he answered a question about Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s successor this way: “I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodriguez] in Venezuela.”
I think he believed Iran could and would be converted in short order by U.S. firepower into another satrapy in which the local authorities govern at his imperial sufferance. Instead Iran’s regime has remained defiant under fire, not only effectively closing the Strait and attacking energy production facilities around the region to inflict economic pain on the U.S. but naming Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, as the country’s new supreme leader. Mojtaba Khamenei is reportedly “considerably more violent and ideological than his father” and was named explicitly by Trump in his Axios interview as an “unacceptable” choice to govern Iran.
Mojtaba is not another Delcy Rodríguez. He’s a middle finger to the White House by what’s left of the clerical government to signal that it won’t compromise with the U.S., even now.
“I guess the worst case [scenario] would be we do this and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person, right?” the president told reporters last week in the Oval Office. “That could happen. We don’t want that to happen … You go through this, and then, in five years, you realize you put somebody in who was no better.” That’s precisely what the U.S. is now facing with the younger Khamenei, whose elevation has made his father’s death feel less like a triumph for America and Israel than a setback on balance.
Did the White House plan for this? Or any of this, really?
No Plan B.
As noted, it didn’t plan for how formidable Shahed drones would be. One of those drones killed six American soldiers stationed in Kuwait; others have disabled some of the ultra-sophisticated radar installations on which U.S. missile defense depends.
It seems not to have planned for surging gasoline prices either, forcing White House chief of staff Susie Wiles to scramble after the war began for ideas on how to slow the spike. Amazingly, per Politico, “The Trump administration did not start hitting the phones to discuss ways to calm oil and gas markets until several days after the attacks started and oil prices started rising.”
It clearly had no plans to mount a ground offensive against the regime via some proxy force. The cockamamie “arm the Kurds” plan has already been renounced by Trump and there’s no sign of the hoped-for uprising against the regime by Iranian citizens. On the contrary, U.S. and Israeli strikes have damaged civilian buildings like schools and hospitals. And Israel’s attack on oil depots this weekend caused large fires and intense smoke in Tehran, alarming U.S. officials.
Nor is it clear how much planning has been done to counter Iranian terrorist operations abroad. “Sleeper cells” may have already been activated, yet Kash Patel spent the days before the war gutting an FBI unit tasked with tracking Iranian threats because some members committed the sin of working on the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation during the Biden administration.
The FBI and other intelligence agencies did try to issue a bulletin on Friday warning local U.S. law enforcement to stay alert for terror plots, but that was blocked by the White House. “They don’t want anything getting out that says what they’re doing in Iran is raising the threat level at home,” a Homeland Security official told Britain’s Daily Mail.
I’m tempted to say that the administration didn’t plan strategically for how this war with Iran would damage our allies in Ukraine, but that assumes that the White House wants Ukraine to win its war and there’s little reason to believe that’s true.
Spiking oil prices have created a windfall for Russia, giving its war machine an infusion of cash. On top of that, at around the same time Volodymyr Zelensky was sending Ukrainian advisers to the Middle East to help America solve its Shahed problem, the White House lifted sanctions that will allow India to purchase Russian oil for the next month as the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz persists.
Then, on Friday, news broke that Russia is supplying Iran with intelligence on the location of U.S. military assets to help target our forces. That’s payback for years of American assistance to Ukraine—ironically at the very moment America’s new war has rescued Russia’s oil industry. We can’t be more than a few days away from Vladimir Putin dialing up the president to propose a quid pro quo: We’ll cut off intelligence to Iran if you cut off intelligence to Ukraine.
The comprehensive lack of planning suggests that it wasn’t just autocratic imperiousness that led the president to go to war without the public’s support. He may have been so confident that the regime would capitulate quickly, before a backlash here in the U.S. could gather, that he didn’t need contingency plans for what to do if it didn’t. And in a way I don’t blame him for that: Capitulating quickly is what Trump himself would have done if he were the president of a lesser power like Venezuela or Iran suddenly being menaced by a military behemoth. He wouldn’t lead some heroic national resistance in the Zelensky mold. He’d make a deal to save his own skin like Delcy Rodríguez.
The Iranians surprised him with their resolve and now the president needs an exit strategy before the global economy melts down, an outcome that would somewhat complicate the immense pride he takes in the image he built during his first term of being some sort of economic Merlin. What pretext will he find to TACO?
Saving face.
“There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” he declared on Friday, later telling Axios that that term would encompass either a formal surrender or “when they can’t fight any longer because they don’t have anyone or anything to fight with.”
Neither outcome is in the offing, though, to the point where even America’s own intelligence bureaus believe it’s “unlikely” that the regime will fall. The “unconditional surrender” demand reads less like a serious threat by Trump than a desperate bluff to try to scare regime leaders after a week of bombing failed to do so.
Not only is the regime not poised to surrender after choosing a fanatic like Mojtaba Khamenei to lead it, it’s vowing to widen the conflict. “The war has entered a new phase and the attack on Iran’s oil and fuel depots will definitely be met with regional retaliation,” one Iranian official told CNN this weekend. “Iran will not give up control of the Strait of Hormuz until it achieves its desired results.” They’re not fighting well but they are fighting smart: The worse the energy crisis gets, the greater the domestic and global outcry at Trump will be and the likelier TACO will become.
He might be preparing his order already, in fact. “I think the war is very complete, pretty much. They have no navy, no communications, they’ve got no Air Force,” the president told CBS News in an interview this afternoon. Asked about the timeline of four to five weeks for the conflict that he’d given previously, he said U.S. operations were “very far” ahead of schedule. The TACO to end all TACOs is nigh. And not a moment too soon for jittery investors.
All he needs is a face-saving way to declare victory before withdrawing. There are a few options.
One is killing Mojtaba Khamenei. Eliminating the new supreme leader would let Trump claim that he kept his pledge to not let Iran be ruled by a new guy who’s as bad as the old one. He might approach the regime’s clerics with a quiet offer: If they agree to replace Khamenei with someone who can be sold to Americans as a “moderate,” even if that person functions only as a figurehead, the U.S. will cease hostilities.
What about the nuclear program, though? It would be awfully hard to TACO credibly in Iran without proof that the new war meaningfully degraded what was left of the country’s nuclear capabilities.
One possibility is to insert U.S. ground troops to find and remove the stockpile of enriched uranium that was entombed after America’s attack on Iran’s nuclear stations last year. “An Israeli defense official said Trump and his team are seriously considering sending special operations units into Iran for specific missions,” Axios reported. “A U.S. official said the administration has discussed two options: removing the [uranium] from Iran entirely, or bringing in nuclear experts to dilute it on-site.”
Successfully extricating Iran’s atomic ammunition is the purest “mission accomplished” scenario available to the White House short of regime change, but it would be “really, really, really difficult and extremely dangerous,” one security expert told Semafor. “They would need earth-moving equipment, which would have to be brought there.” It would be far easier for the U.S. and Israeli air forces to simply “bounce the rubble” where the uranium is believed to be located, burying it further. But in that case, Americans would wonder why Trump didn’t do that from the start instead of launching a sustained nationwide attack.
If all else fails, the White House could seek to declare victory on the basis of how badly degraded Iran’s missile capabilities have become. We took out their missiles, we killed the ayatollah, we buried their uranium where they’ll never reach it (if Trump strikes the uranium facilities again), and we’ll be ready to strike again in the future if and when they try to rearm.
That’s the way he seems to be leaning per his interview with CBS News. Is that enough to justify a quick TACO in this war before gas hits 12 bucks a gallon?
I think it would be for the president, who certainly cares more about his deteriorating image as a “prosperity president” than he does about stability or democracy in Iran. But he isn’t the only one who gets a vote here.
Two to TACO.
In an interview yesterday, Trump said that the decision to end the war would be “mutual” between himself and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But our two nations’ interests in Iran aren’t perfectly aligned, as the rift over Israel’s attacks on Iran’s oil depots demonstrates. The U.S. can grudgingly live with a Khomeinist regime that’s been battered, considerably disarmed, and substantially denuclearized, content that long-range missiles that would threaten America remain well out of Tehran’s technological right now.
But Israel has to share a neighborhood with these monsters, who’ll be out for revenge when the conflict ends, and the Israeli leadership doubtless understands that public opinion in the United States will make another joint military campaign with the U.S. against Iran impossible. This is their last, best chance to do irreversible damage to the Khomeinists and perhaps loosen their grip on power. They won’t want a TACO in this case, any more than Netanyahu wanted talks earlier this year between the U.S. and Iran to derail the war that the two countries had been planning.
So what happens if Trump says, “We’re done” and Netanyahu says, “We’re not”?
If you believe Marco Rubio, the U.S. entered the war because the White House believed Israel would attack whether or not Trump approved. TACO in Iran could face the same problem: The U.S. might withdraw, but it’s hard to imagine the Iranians responding to that by graciously reopening the Strait of Hormuz if Israel’s air campaign is still raging. Keeping oil commerce bottled up is Iran’s greatest point of leverage in pressuring the White House to convince Israel to cease fire. Why wouldn’t they continue to use it until all of the bombs stop falling, not just America’s?
The fate of the global economy may soon depend, in other words, on Donald Trump’s willingness and ability to get Benjamin Netanyahu to stop fighting a conflict he’s spent 30 years believing that Israel must fight. Sometimes it takes two to TACO.
