Ross Douthat

I think that's a good overview.

Let's go back to where we are now in phase one.

There's no question, as you've said, that we have degraded Iran's military.

However, it's also clear that at the moment, the Iranians are still quite capable of firing missiles and rockets at their neighbors, menacing the infrastructure that the entire Persian Gulf depends upon, meaning not just oil and gas, but desalinization plants and power plants.

The number of missiles fired has gone way down, but it hasn't dropped to zero.

And then...

More importantly, the Iranians have essentially closed the Strait of Hormuz, throwing global energy markets into turmoil.

What do we do about that?

It's good to imagine that.

I don't want to get too deep into...

the deeper justifications for war yet.

But I just want to say, we're not in the Obama timeline.

We're in a timeline where the US and Israel successfully delivered some significant blows to Iranian power.

And now we've decided to deliver

another more profound one.

And it is that blow that has yielded the Iranian closure of the Straits.

So that's where we are now.

So it's not that the counterfactual is important, but so is the reality that we delivered a set of blows successfully.

We chose to go further.

That has activated a really substantial Iranian response that threatens