Suzanne Maloney

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.

It's clear that

You know, he has campaigned really, and in some ways he was prescient in appreciating the impact of the quote unquote forever wars on the American people, on the American economy, something that has been a long trend and theme in his own political career from his first bid for the presidency throughout his first term and again in this term.

And yet he has been very prone to using military action in this second Trump term.

but in discrete, limited ways that were intended as decapitation strikes or other, you know, very small-bore efforts.

And it seems that he didn't fully recognize the potential fallout from an Iran strike, that there was no way to decapitate the regime and quickly move to some kind of an alternative power that would be more friendly to the United States.