Witcoff and Kushner can unpack their bags. Then again, maybe they always keep an Islamabad bag packed, just in case. But another round of talks with Iran seems like a waste of jet fuel at this point, so the cancellation appears wise.

The gist of what I’m been reading lately – whether it is correct or incorrect – says that the economic screws we’ve been tightening on Iran right now seem to be having the desired effect:

Iran is scrambling to get a massive crude carrier to Kharg Island, in a sign that President Trump’s blockade is bringing the regime’s oil-critical hub — which controls roughly 90% of Iranian crude oil exports — to the brink, according to a report.

Tehran has been forced to take a 30-year-old oil tanker, Nasha, out of retirement as Kharg Island nears its maximum onshore capacity, Gulf News reported Friday.

The vessel, which has been anchored empty for the past several years, is being revived as floating storage for Iran’s teeming crude supply, the outlet reported. …

The frantic move comes as Kharg Island’s remaining spare storage could fill up in just 12 to 13 days, with Iran’s net oil inflow running around 1 million barrels per day, analysts told Gulf News. …

Trump threatened to finish the war “militarily with the other 25% of the targets” if Iranian leaders “don’t want to make a deal,” he warned Thursday.

I doubt he’ll do more bombing if he thinks Iran really is on the brink of economic collapse in a way that threatens the regime. The oil reserves are a big big deal in this sense. The link I just gave is to a CNN article which I chose because it offers a relatively gloomy estimate for amount of time it will take; other source say it would be shorter, a matter of weeks. But the principle is the same:

If the country cannot shift the millions of barrels of oil it produces daily, it could be forced to cut production. Crude oil and petroleum product exports are Iran’s primary source of foreign currency.

Iran could probably sustain current oil production for another two to three months before storage issues become “a significant consideration,” Batmanghelidj said.

Iran also still has plenty of oil storage space remaining onshore, shipping analytics firm Kpler said, noting it has almost 30 million barrels of headroom, which means it’s still weeks away from its limit.

It could even push storage capacity longer if it finds other methods of offloading the stored oil.

One option Iran is exploring is using its retired crude tankers.

The CNN article omits this sort of thing about what “shutting down” might actually mean:

This is a well-known technical challenge in petroleum engineering. If Iran were to deliberately curtail or shut in production across its major fields, water infiltration (also called water influx or water encroachment) would be a serious and potentially irreversible problem. Here’s why:

The Core Mechanics
Most of Iran’s giant fields — Ahvaz, Gachsaran, Marun, Aghajari — are carbonate reservoirs under natural water drive. Aquifers underlying or flanking the reservoir rock are under pressure, and they push water upward into the pore space as oil is produced. When you stop producing oil, you remove the pressure sink that was keeping water at bay. The aquifer doesn’t stop — it keeps pushing.

Much more of the technical stuff can be found at the link to the tweet. Suffice to say it probably would be a major, perhaps permanent, problem.

Trump and Netanyahu have the task of balancing harm to the current regime against harm to the people of a future Iran. They want to maximize the former and minimize the latter, if possible.