Forty-seven years ago, the Islamic Republic of Iran vowed Marg bar Amrika!, “Death to America!”
That declaration of war was followed by multiple acts of war from the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran to the orchestration of two bombings of Americans in Beirut in 1983 to the arming of Shia militias who killed more than 600 Americans in Iraq from 2003 to 2011 to numerous assassination and kidnapping plots.
American attempts to end the war diplomatically failed. Five presidents vowed that Iran’s rulers would never be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons. Iran’s rulers repeated what Ruhollah Khomeini, father of the Islamic Revolution, observed in 1979: “The Americans can’t do a damn thing against us.”
Even the 12-day war last summer, which culminated when American B-2 stealth bombers dropped MOPs, or Massive Ordnance Penetrators, on three Iranian nuclear facilities, failed to diminish the regime’s ambition and determination to build back better.
Last month, according Steve Witkoff, U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, Iranian negotiators kicked off a meeting by announcing that they “controlled 460 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium,” which “could make 11 nuclear bombs.”
The world has never seen anything like this. On second thought, maybe it has.
Back when the United States was a young republic, there were the Barbary States—Islamic regimes along the North African coast. Piracy was their policy: seizing American merchant ships in the Mediterranean and enslaving their crews.
Presidents George Washington and John Adams tried diplomacy, including paying tribute. The jihadis saw that as weakness and carried on.
Finally, President Thomas Jefferson decided to give war a chance, sending the Marines to fight on sea and land, including on “the shores of Tripoli.”
The challenge for the third American president was to stay the course until the battle was decisively won. The challenge for the 47th American president is the same, though today the threat is greater and the stakes higher.
Though much of the mainstream media is wish-casting a quagmire, the combined U.S.-Israeli operation has, in a little more than just two weeks, seriously degraded the regime’s nuclear facilities, military capabilities and repression apparatus, eliminating thousands of members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Basij militia and other security forces.
In response, the surviving members of the regime have played what they believe to be their trump card (please forgive the pun): targeting the production of oil by their Arab neighbors and preventing the flow of oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz.
Through this body of water—only 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point with two-mile-wide navigable shipping lanes—roughly 20% of global oil has transited in recent decades.
Cutting off that supply has hiked the cost of oil. To an unprecedented level? Not at all. For instance, on June 14, 2022, following Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine, the price at the pump hit a record high of $5.02 per gallon.
Iran’s rulers are, nonetheless, betting that if they can push prices higher, U.S. President Donald Trump will cave. They will then say: “See? We survived! We beat the Great Satan, and we still control the world’s most important energy chokepoint! We’re winners! Trump is a loser!”
So, winning the Battle of Hormuz is essential. Is it a mission impossible? The military experts I’m talking with say it will take time—weeks, not months—to destroy the regime’s anti-ship missiles, drones, mines and fast-attack craft, the asymmetric arsenal used by the naval arm of the IRGC, along with the facilities that produce them.
After that, the United States, together with whichever nations are willing and able, should guarantee freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz—a basic international law, the modern expression of the centuries-old principle of freedom of the seas.
On March 14, Trump announced on social media that Tehran’s military facilities on Kharg Island, about 300 miles northwest of the strait, had been “obliterated” by American airpower. Kharg Island handles up to 90% of Iran’s crude oil exports that then pass through the strait to reach global markets. Nearly half of China’s seaborne crude oil imports take that route.
Trump emphasized that this operation was carried out with such exquisite precision that the oil infrastructure is still standing. “However,” he added on social media, “should Iran, or anyone else, do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz, I will immediately reconsider this decision.”
A Marine Expeditionary Unit is now on its way to the region. To seize the 7.7 square mile limestone outcrop? That’s an option.
If you’re a patriotic American, you want the United States to win. A one-sentence definition of total victory: The jihadi regime in Iran is defanged and crippled, incapable of reconstituting its nuclear program, its capacity to wage war on the U.S. and its allies broken, its repression apparatus hobbled, its attacks on commercial shipping halted and the Iranian people enabled to seize this once-in-a-generation chance to free themselves from the oppressive, mass-murdering theocracy.
More broadly, we could then enter an era in which the Middle East is dominated by American allies. That will allow Washington to focus elsewhere.
For example, if the Strait of Hormuz is under U.S. control when Trump next talks with Xi Jinping, China’s Communist ruler, he might tell him: “I know your economy depends on the oil that passes through the strait, which is now firmly under my protection. That’s good for you, my friend! Unless, of course, other conflicts erupt in other regions like—oh, just spit-balling here—maybe some island in East Asia.”
“And by the way: Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Originally published in “The Washington Times.”
