David Frum

And at some point, you have to deal with whatever is left.

And that point will come earlier rather than later, and maybe earlier than the United States can afford for that point to come.

If the United States has not given Americans any inkling of the pain that was likely to be headed their way, any reason for it, any reason to hope that things will be better after it.

So the Iranians are discovering that if they just inflict economic pain, which they can easily do, they can bring pressure to bear on Trump that is much greater on him than the pressure he is bearing to them by blowing up things and killing bad guys.

We don't know how much margin of survival the Iranian regime has.

It is, in many ways, a fragile country.

It depends on oil exports.

And the United States could interdict those oil exports if it wanted to.

But because the United States doesn't have a capacity for plane, it's not interdicting Iranian oil exports.

At the end of a month of war, Iran is exporting not only as much oil as it ever did, as much oil as it did last year, but it's exporting that oil at a higher price, billions and billions of dollars more higher price than it was making before the war started.

And that means that even if the United States were to succeed in reducing Iranian oil exports somewhat, it would not be putting budgetary pressure on the Iranian regime.

It's a plan for war without politics.

And that's a plan for war without success.

and now my dialogue with Graham Wood.

But first, a quick break.

If Graham Wood's business card does not read international man of mystery, it should.

His recent report from the Persian Gulf, snorkeling in the Strait of Hormuz, is Graham at his most characteristic, in the center of the action, seeing things the way no one else sees them, and preserving calm where most of us would see only danger and terror.

A Harvard graduate who now teaches at Yale, an Arabic speaker, Graham began his journalism career as a reporter for the Cambodia Daily.

On the outbreak of the Iraq War, he relocated to Iraq and was hired by the Atlantic, where he continues as a colleague to this day.

Graham's deep investigations of the ISIS terror organization generated a viral Atlantic article and were published in book form in 2016, The Way of the Strangers, which won acclaim and awards all over the world, including the Governor General Award of Canada, of which Graham and I are both citizens.