Ben Shapiro

Quote, first, Beijing built the financial plumbing, developing methods for shadow banking, obscuring the origins of Iranian crude, rotating ship identities, layering payments through third country intermediaries.

Second, its teapot refinery sector absorbed most of Iran's oil exports to China.

Third, Xi used Iran as a rehearsal space, refining evasion techniques he intended to deploy on a far greater scale if Washington decided to directly pressure China.

However, we have now unleashed Operation Economic Fury and it's cracking down on all of these things.

What appears to be a pressure campaign against the IRGC and another against Beijing's financial architecture is in fact a single operation.

And President Trump is not wavering here.

I mean, it's an amazing thing.

I've said it before.

President Trump is doing the single most politically courageous thing I've ever seen because, again, it is always a risky game to get involved in foreign policy that involves kinetic action.

That's particularly true in the Middle East.

And President Trump has the cojones to actually stay the course.

So Iran keeps trying to drag this out.

But one of the things you should notice about what Iran is doing, Iran keeps trying to fire on ships.

The reason they're firing on ships is because the worst case scenario for Iran basically goes like this.

The worst thing that could happen for Iran is the United States decides to destroy its energy supply.

We destroy their energy supply.

And basically, they're the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

They can lie there with no arms and no legs.

That's about all they can do if we destroy their energy supplies.

But the second worst thing for them is the maintenance of the blockade.