Suzanne Maloney

We would have the impact to the global economy because we would have turned off the spigot on another million or million five barrels a day.

There have been war games that have looked at what a United States-Iranian war might, how it might play out.

And they have all involved some threat to the Strait of Hormuz, as well as some response from the international community led by the United States to reopen it.

The military options for the United States in terms of reopening the Strait are not particularly attractive ones.

This is a

A very small and narrow passageway, but the entirety literal coast of the Persian Gulf would have to be defended if we were going to ensure that we could have normal tanker traffic moving through the Gulf.

And you'd really have to occupy a significant swath of territory because obviously those troops would be vulnerable to Iranian attacks.

So it's not something that five or 10 or 20,000 troops are going to be able to do over a sustained period of time in an effective way.

I think this idea that Karg Island or Kesham Island, which is another large strategically positioned island in the Gulf, or taking parts of Iran's coastline, they sound great on paper.

In practice, they don't fix the problem quickly or neatly, and they probably result in a large number of casualties for the United States.

And I think that all of this just underscores that there wasn't really a plan thought through around this military operation.

The president and Prime Minister Netanyahu seem to have engaged in magical thinking that somehow that the regime, which had been heavily weakened by the internal protests, by the June war that had obliterated, in the president's words, the nuclear program, and by the erosion of Iran's proxy militias around the region over the course of the past several years—

And the presumption seems to have been that the regime would just collapse on day one or two or three.

That hasn't happened.

It doesn't appear likely to happen, at least under the current circumstances.

And so what we're stuck with is just an array of very bad options, bad diplomatic options, bad military options.

No, I think you said it better than I possibly could.

There isn't really a military solution to the strait that can be achieved by the United States as long as the regime remains in power.

The Islamic Republic was intended to fall as a result of this military operation by the United States and Israel.

When that didn't happen, I think the president didn't really have any other options.