Gregg Carlstrom

speaker

496 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Gregg Carlstrom’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Strait and narrowing: the Iran deal crumbles · 15 Jul 2026 podcast

So if it's not willing to release Hormuz in return for sanctions relief, then I think this is a short term tactical victory, but longer term it's strategically questionable for the Iranians.

It has a few options, but none of them are good.

The first one is what we're seeing now, which is these limited strikes on military targets in southern Iran.

The problem here is we've had now six nights of those airstrikes on more than 300 targets, and they haven't changed Iran's behavior.

And there's no reason to think that a seventh or an eighth or a tenth will be the one that makes a difference.

The regime has already been

been through six weeks of very intense American and Israeli bombing earlier in the war, and it's not clear that

some occasional bombing now is going to seriously degrade their capabilities or convince them to change their behavior.

It could.

It could go back to the sort of large-scale bombing that we saw in March and early April, but there's no guarantee that will succeed either.

America could carry out strikes on infrastructure in Iran, as Trump threatened to do yesterday.

That would invite reciprocal attacks, though, on Gulf states.

It might also be a war crime.

It could try to deploy ground troops to seize islands in the Strait of Hormuz or to the Iranian.

And coast, the mainland.

But doing that, I think, is a political non-starter in Washington.

There would be a lot of opposition to it, and there's no guarantee it actually works.

Iran can just keep attacking ships from further inland because it has missiles and drones with relatively long ranges.

Reinstating the blockade of Hormuz, which Trump has done, may be less fraught than ground troops or larger bombings.

It brings us back to this economic staring contest to see which side blinks first, but there's no guarantee Iran accepts it this time.

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