The Next Iran Strike Ends in a Global Oil Shock or a Nuke. There Is No Third Option.

Every few weeks now, Washington walks to the edge of the same cliff, looks down, and walks back. The bombs were reportedly already being fitted to aircraft for a strike on Yemen in support of Saudi Arabia when the order came to stand down. A three-day strike plan against Iran, directed against Iranian energy infrastructure, leaked, circulated, and was shelved. Each time, the president’s critics mock him for flinching. Each time, they have it backward. The flinch is the sanest thing about this presidency. But it is also not a strategy, and it cannot hold forever.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. A man who stands at the edge of an abyss and decides not to jump has gained nothing permanent. He has gained a day. Tomorrow he will stand there again, with the same fleet in the Gulf, the same advisers in his ear, the same prime minister in Jerusalem telling him the job is unfinished. He can say no a hundred times. He only has to say yes once, and the consequences of that one yes are horrific and permanent. That is the position the United States has placed itself in, and it is a position with no exit other than the one nobody in power is willing to take: declaring victory and going home.

Consider what the last escalation actually produced. Forty days of bombing did not overthrow the Islamic Republic. It did not break Iran’s will. It expended a large share of America’s standoff munitions, exposed forward bases to retaliation that destroyed them along with the radars that would have warned of the next attack, and left the United States in a weaker military position in the region than when it started. Iran answered with a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz that, after a brief relaxation, has tightened again. Ships are hitting mines in the southern corridor, something Tehran had avoided before. The British maritime agency that tracks attacks has admitted the true number of strikes may be double what it records. Brent crude sits above a hundred dollars a barrel and, given the risk, should be higher.

That is the record of the campaign that was supposed to work. There is no bigger version of it available. The munitions are not there, the bases are not there, and the element of surprise is gone. So when the president and the prime minister talk about finishing the job, they cannot mean doing more of the same. They can only mean doing something different, and there are only two different things left to do.

The first is to change the target list. The mainstream press has reported that the White House is weighing a short strike on Iran’s energy infrastructure. Iran has already said what the answer to that would be. If strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure, such as Kharg Island, prevent Iran from exporting oil, then nobody in the Gulf will be exporting oil either. This is not a bluff. The facilities in Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait sit within easy reach of the same kinds of drones and missiles that have already destroyed a sixth of Qatar’s LNG facilities in Ras Laffan, hit the East West pipeline pumping stations, and severely damaged refineries throughout the Gulf. An attack on Iranian oil is an attack on the global oil supply, by way of a short detour.

The second thing left to do is the one nobody wants to say out loud, and so it is worth saying plainly. The so-called mother of all bombs has been used in combat exactly once, in Afghanistan, where it was pushed out the back of a special operations transport plane. It cannot be delivered any other way. That aircraft is big, slow, and propeller-driven, and would present a fat, easy target for Iranian air defense. The only way to use the bomb is to ask Iran’s permission first. That is not a figure of speech. According to Iranian state media, Washington did exactly that, through a third party: let us drop this, do not retaliate, and we can all declare the matter closed. A year ago, Tehran might have taken that deal. It had taken similar ones before. This Iran, angrier and far more confident, refused.

In the president’s mind, the offer was an act of generosity. He was handing Tehran (and himself) an off-ramp. Tehran declined it, which means that, from his perspective, he tried being nice and it did not work. When the biggest conventional bomb cannot be dropped, the mind drifts toward the one that does not need a transport plane. There are already rumors in Washington and Jerusalem about it. Nobody should pretend those rumors are idle. The temptation to reach for a nuclear weapon grows out of weakness, not strength, and the United States and Israel are weaker in this fight than they have admitted to themselves.

Into this, the president has just thrown his endorsement of Benjamin Netanyahu, days before Israelis vote, with a statement that the two of them together can finish the job in Iran if necessary. Mr. Netanyahu responded with a speech warning that without this action, Iran could soon be targeting every American city. That is the man who is advising the White House on the region, the man with the plan, the one with the confidence. Who can say that President Trump, who clearly is at a loss as to what to do, won’t act on his advice again?

The timing is not hard to read. Mr. Netanyahu wants the blow to land before his election, but the clock is nearly out. The American midterms fall in early November, and the political cost of an operation that further boosts gasoline prices is far lower after the ballots are counted than before. So the likeliest window is right after the midterms, with a smaller chance of something sooner, and the smallest chance of all that nothing happens at all. The strike will not come with much warning. It will come the way the Venezuela operation came: one morning, the world will wake up, and it will already be done.

Could the restraint hold? It has held before. And against the advice of most of his own advisers, the president has also gone over the edge before, into this very war. Those two facts have to be held together. The sane part of his judgment is real, and it has saved this country more than once this year. But the fleet is still there. The tankers are still staged at Ben Gurion. The adviser with the loudest voice is still the one who wants it most. Every day the situation persists is another roll of the dice, and one of these days the dice will come up snake eyes.

The only credible signal that the danger has passed will not be a statement or a truce announcement. It will be the carriers leaving, the tankers flying home, and the president declaring a victory he did not win and meaning it. Until that happens, the question is not whether he will step back from the edge again. He probably will, several more times. The question is whether anyone has noticed that stepping back has never once moved the cliff.

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