Michael Knowles

He doesn't want to get in these quagmires.

And then he kills Soleimani or he drops the Moab or he takes out Maduro or

Or in this case, he takes out the Ayatollah, the most senior Muslim leader in the world.

And he does these things that allow him to maintain some unpredictability.

So with that tweet that he sent out, he goes, open the effing straits or you'll all be living in hell.

Praise be to Allah.

To me, what I really liked about that tweet is it seemed very disciplined.

It seemed reckless at first, but when you read that dry humor line at the end, all praise to Allah, you can see he's being disciplined here and he's mocking the way that they speak.

The Iranians are the ones who I say-

The great Satan will go down in a ball of fire, you know, ah la la la, whatever.

And so he's kind of mocking the way that they speak.

My argument for what he's doing, just in a short way, a concise way, is there was good to be achieved here.

I never thought the Iranian regime was going to fall.

I always thought that those kinds of comments were way overselling the war.

The goods that are achieved are you further weaken their nuclear program, which they're going to continue to pursue.

You really mess up their ballistics missiles program, which was being used to defend the nuclear program.

You sink their military.

You kill the top like 15 layers of their government.

But the regime remains in place in a similar way that we saw in Venezuela.

And especially if you can make sure the Strait of Hormuz remains open so that the best card that the Iranians have to play doesn't actually redound to their benefit, then you have achieved some strategic objectives that the U.S.