Trump Settlels In for Long Siege of Iran

I had hoped for a more "kinetic" operation with Iran done and dusted a year before the mid-terms. But that's now impossible, of course, so a long slow strangulation will do.

Trump to Axios: "We are low-keying it" with Iran

President Trump signaled on Sunday that he's prepared to allow economic pressure on Iran to mount -- as opposed to ordering a new military offensive -- even as the country continues to defy the U.S.

Why it matters: Only a week ago, Trump was on the verge of ordering a return to major combat operations. But in an interview with Axios, he did not make any new military threats.

Trump also didn't express any anger or frustration about the fact that Iran has been holding up an announcement on a deal with Oman to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. On Saturday, Iran issued a new list of demands to allow shipping through the strait.

What he's saying: "We are low-keying it," Trump said during a brief phone call.

"We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money."

He stressed that Iran "is in very bad shape" economically and has no money to pay its troops. The U.S. naval blockade has exacerbated the Iranian regime's economic crisis, Trump said.

At the same time, Trump said that with oil down to slightly over $75 a barrel, U.S. consumers are feeling less pain from the war.

"It will work out. It always works out. It's like a chess game," Trump said of the back-and-forth with Iran.

...

One of the officials said the fighting allowed the Iranian regime to avoid dealing with the consequences of the war, the damage to infrastructure and the deep economic crisis that has been created.

When Iran isn't engaged in war, it is forced to confront a grim reality with no real solutions at hand, the U.S. official said.

At the same time, the U.S. official said, around 8 million barrels of oil are going out of the Gulf every night through the southern lane of the Strait of Hormuz in coordination with the U.S. military. The U.S. is going to try and get more oil out as long as there is no deal.

Duane Patterson writes that Iran is dying economically.

Let's take a look at life currently in Iran. Miad Maleki is a former United States Treasury official, Air Force veteran, and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who follows the Iranian economy like very few others.

A pause in strikes buys the Iranian regime time, not relief. The regime's most crippling reckoning isn't with the U.S. or Israel but it's with its own people. Barely 35% of working-age Iranians actually have a job and the current minimum wage covers barely a quarter of actual living costs.

Iranians know their country's true economic potential and know they deserve better, the Islamic Republic's revolutionary ideology is dead, even among the regime's own children.

The regime can evade external accountability, but the most punishing thing to the regime right now is to force them to go back to face domestic accountability, an economy that, when not retrained by a state of war, will show its underlying disastrous inflation, unemployment, corrupt trade, war damages, and crippled political institutions.

Iran has never been so diplomatically isolated, its share of global trade has collapsed from 2.2% to below 0.02%. That isolation will keep showing up in Iran's economy as businesses, even in friendly countries, refuse to risk trade and investment there given sanctions exposure and war risk.

Iran's official unemployment number hovers just under 10 percent, which is bad, but not calamitous...until you figure in that only four out of ten able-bodied Iranians are even in the workforce seeking jobs. The rest have given up looking for jobs that are not there. And Iran's share of the global economy plunging to less than two one-hundredths of a percent means they're not manufacturing or exporting anything these days that would necessitate employment for anyone outside of the IRGC or Basij forces, who also have been unpaid for months.

Mark Dubowitz @mdubowitz

The Iranian rial sinks to its lowest level ever: 1,944,000 to USD. It was 70:1 on eve of the Islamic Revolution.

The Islamist regime in Iran is a human-made catastrophe.

Speaking of sieges: Ukraine just blew up a Russian oil refinery located 1000 km from its borders.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 02:10 PM

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