Trump seems to have decided to take the economic pressure route on Iran for now
At least, that’s what he’s saying at the moment:
“We are low-keying it,” Trump said during a brief phone call.
“We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.”
He stressed that Iran “is in very bad shape” economically and has no money to pay its troops. The U.S. naval blockade has exacerbated the Iranian regime’s economic crisis, Trump said.
At the same time, Trump said that with oil down to slightly over $75 a barrel, U.S. consumers are feeling less pain from the war.
“It will work out. It always works out. It’s like a chess game,” Trump said of the back-and-forth with Iran.
I had long thought that it was the Iranians (Persians) who invented chess, but that’s not exactly true:
The history of chess can be traced back nearly 1,500 years to its earliest known predecessor, called chaturanga, in India; its prehistory is the subject of speculation. From India it spread to Persia, where it was modified in terms of shapes and rules and developed into shatranj. Following the Arab invasion and conquest of Persia, chess was taken up by the Muslim world and subsequently spread to Europe via Spain (Al Andalus) and Italy (Emirate of Sicily). The game evolved roughly into its current form by about 1500 CE.
How is Iran actually doing economically and politically?
U.S. officials also say there are growing disagreements inside the Iranian regime. One camp, led by President Masoud Pezeshkian, is extremely worried about an economic collapse and believes Iran needs to reach a deal with the U.S. Another led by the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Ahmad Vahidi, rejects any concessions.
“Good cop, bad cop”? I very much doubt that either is actually a good cop.
I don’t especially trust any predictions on Iran, so I’ll skip them.
There’s also this:
After months of conflict, Iranian officials decided the United States should compensate them for damages tied to the war. …
[Trump replied]:
“It is an interesting idea because now I am likewise demanding compensation from Iran, for all of the people that they have killed and gravely wounded with their roadside bombs and many conflicts,” Trump countered.
He went on to mention the USS Cole bombing from nearly 26 years ago and suggested compensation to America should include consideration of “thousands of others killed in combat.”
“Additionally, compensation should be paid to the families of the hundreds of thousands of innocent protestors that Iran has killed over the last 50 years, not to mention the 52,000 that have been killed in the last five months,” he added.
Trump said he has instructed his representatives to include the compensation demand into “any, and all, future negotiations.”
I don’t think negotiations have much of a future. But then, I never did think so.
Sigh…the IRGC doesn’t give two sh1ts to a damn about economic collapse. They have zero interest in the welfare of the people. Survival is the only win in their minds. The only way this ends is to kill them off. Where are Sherman and Patton when we need them? Trump could use some lessons from them.
The Iranians can “win” in their minds under any kind of conditions. They’re completely free to declare victory from underneath the rubble while eating dead cats and scrounging for canned goods. We’re not, or ought not to be, deciding whether or not we “won” based on whatever whoever claims to speak for the government of Iran claims is victory.
Whether or not we actually “win” depends on what Iran is left capable of doing, not what they’re left capable of saying. There’s so little actual information that I don’t have any opinion on that, but if they are actually left incapable of causing significant trouble outside their borders for the next 20 – 50 years or so, I don’t care if they say they “defeated” us or not. They’ll just look stupid and delusional, like Saddam Hussein did all those times HE declared victory.
I may have mentioned before Iran doesn’t have to win , they only have to not lose.
My guess is that Trump really thought he was close to a deal and he preferred a diplomatic solution in order not to completely destroy Iran and not to make the Saudis and Qataris unhappy.
My next guess is that he decided decapitating Iran now was too risky this close to midterms and that his best bet is to “low-key it”.
My political consultant friend says that after Labor Day it’s really hard to change voters’ minds in time for November.
Right now Trump’s poll numbers are at record lows for this term. So if he’s going to improve those numbers, he had better work harder on the economy and shut up about Iran for the time being.
physicsguy:
Tyrannical regimes tend to fall when they can’t pay their hired guns. The IRGC has the advantage of having hired guns who are fanatics, but I’ve read estimates that a significant number are not fanatics and are in it for the perks. If the perks stop, what then?
This is why it is very difficult to make predications on this. And so I don’t.
Niketas: The Iranians can “win” in their minds under any kind of conditions. They’re completely free to declare victory from underneath the rubble while eating dead cats and scrounging for canned goods. We’re not, or ought not to be, deciding whether or not we “won” based on whatever whoever claims to speak for the government of Iran claims is victory.
Whether or not we actually “win” depends on what Iran is left capable of doing, not what they’re left capable of saying. There’s so little actual information that I don’t have any opinion on that, but if they are actually left incapable of causing significant trouble outside their borders for the next 20 – 50 years or so, I don’t care if they say they “defeated” us or not. They’ll just look stupid and delusional, like Saddam Hussein did all those times HE declared victory.
Truth.
Sigh…the IRGC doesn’t give two sh1ts to a damn about economic collapse.
Agreed, but economic collapse makes it rather difficult to pay for proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen…. Not to mention rebuilding the nuclear program…..No petrodollars, no petroterrorism.
@Keith:I may have mentioned before Iran doesn’t have to win , they only have to not lose.
But they would have to “not lose” in reality, not in propaganda. “Not losing” in reality is not a place they can get to any longer. They have already done a lot of losing.
What’s happening here in the West, on paper, is that people are redefining “lose” in a way that they would in no other circumstance. If our Cabinet were all dead, if all our ships were on the bottom of the Persian Gulf, if all our aircraft had been shot down, if our cargo ships couldn’t leave port, no one in the West would be defining “lose” in a way that would make it look like the US didn’t “lose”. Yet they do so for Iran.
Now why people in the West are doing this, you got me. Some are propagandists, for Iran, against Trump, whatever. Some are people of good will who are susceptible to believing narratives they read in the paper. Some are just confused. My imagination fails to produce other understandable reasons for radically redefining “losing a war” to favor Iranian propaganda.
The commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Ahmad Vahidi, in rejecting any concessions is doing Israel, America and arguably, even the world a favor.
As President Masoud Pezeshkian, if indeed “extremely worried about an economic collapse and believes Iran needs to reach a deal with the U.S.” is obviously seeking time to recover and rebuild their nuclear capabilities.
When faced with a fanatical, mortal enemy, you do not let that mortal enemy get back up off the floor. You crush them beyond their ability to recover. You do so because they have freely, repeatedly and consistently declared that their ‘religious’ imperative that ‘compels’ them to destroy everything we hold dear.
Does anyone doubt that, if the US fell to Iran… millions upon millions of Americans would be murdered and tortured to death? That is the reality we face.
Exactly the right move. They are unable to pay their proxies, economy destroyed, blocked from most revenue, and the oil price effect has been much less than expected
From Omar Khayyam: The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on, not all your piety nor wit can call it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
The Twelver writing is on the remains of their wall. The Twelfth Imam is still in occultation, his sacred well may even be covered with debris.
Vive La Trump.
Iran is run and ruled by Islamic zealots. It cannot be allowed to prevail in any conflict. “Insane” does not apply to them, because insanity is an illness. and these dudes are pure evil. Evil is NOT a mental illness, so let’s not deem it as one.
Trump campaigned against pursuing forever wars without victory.
But with the mother of a half century of world terrorism in Iran, we’re dealing with an enemy committed to winning an Islamic Jihad forever war — namely, against the little Satan (Israel) and the Great Satan (the US). “Death To America!”
In this collision of goals defining world history, it does reveal the wisdom of Trump in removing Maduro from the leadership of Venezuela, and reviving that key oil nation’s oil exports.
Few should think that this calculation alone does not give our president time to deliver the “V” here.
A fact that ought to shame if not silence the propaganda media, fatally mistaken about “conspiracy” after “conspiracy,” again and again.
I am beyond sick and tired of our leftist MSM claiming the Trump USA is in the wrong on this and all other fronts. The MSM is a cancer in our midst that must be excised. Our freedom of speech does not extend to villifying the USA en globo.
@Niketas Choniates : But they would have to “not lose” in reality, not in propaganda. “Not losing” in reality is not a place they can get to any longer. They have already done a lot of losing.
Quite so.
Trump has destroyed decades of Iran’s military build-up, including nuclear, that cost them half a trillion dollars. They are now losing $400 million per day in lost oil revenues. The Iranian economy is suffering 88% yearly inflation.
In chess one may achieve a winning position quickly without being able to win quickly.
Trump has a won game and he could win it quickly by going scorched earth, but there are good reasons not to. His main difficulty is to get through the midterms without losing Congress and facing the predictable malicious Dem nonsense.
But after the midterms it’s a different story,
Trump can only “win” in Iran if his Republicans win in 2026, Nov elections.
If oil is at $75/barrel, far far less than prior highs, the objective cost of living is kinda ok. Oil is one, but not the only, key to a the economy. Itself a key to the election.
Iran might not be key—if Americans aren’t dying, and oil is cheap enough, who cares that the third wave of surviving IRGC leaders remain in control of the country? A country full of unarmed anti-regime folk knowing there are some million or so armed supporters very able & so far willing to kill unarmed protesters. (Well I care, but how much of my vote is based on it?)
Trump succeeded in keeping Iran below nuclear. Seems to be slowly creating ME peace. Is avoiding losing US lives, which would surely be a big, real negative set of stories. It can be viewed as a forever war, tho I wish Trump & Reps would brand it better, like continued non-nuclear enforcement.
If it’s important for authoritarian Muslim regimes to agree to Peace with Israel, and those regimes do NOT want US forces doing regime change (for democracy!), then getting Arab Muslim Peace is more important than booting out IRGC from Iran.
I do hope for some October Surprise against Iran, and thus it wouldn’t surprise me, but I wouldn’t bet on it,
Not in polymarket nor Kalshi.
As for the Iranian leadership, it is “bad cop, worse cop.” Actually, the cop analogy is invalid entirely since the analogy requires that there be a cop in the picture, whereas the iranian leadership is entirely lawless, thus eliminating it as some sort of law-based organization. Unless one means only the law of self-preservation, or perhpas the law of nature, “red in tooth and claw.” And it is not what the mullahs in iran have to say about victory or defeat that matters, only what the American voting public thinks about whether iran is winning or losing, and that is greatly dependent on what the corporate media tells them. SInce the corporate media is merely the propaganda wing of the democrat (now the democrat socialist) party, it is undeniable that they will continue to tell us that iran is winning, even when the iranian strategic picture resembles that of the Black Knight in Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail.
Wars end when one side imposes its will on the other. For all of the sunken ships, destroyed economic base, and dead ayatollahs, we have not imposed our will on Iran. They are not afraid of anything that they we are reasonably likely to do to them in the future. If they were, they would have already agreed to a reasonable deal and certainly wouldn’t be pushing for reparations.
“If” and “we”
Otay CC™-R
om,
For once I agree with Bauxite….we do need to impose our will on the IRGC, or they will just keep stringing us along.
we do need to impose our will on the IRGC
But what’s “our will”? Our will doesn’t need to be “you have to admit you lost and say we’re the greatest and you love us now”. Our will doesn’t have to be “you have to be a secular democracy for real and not a fake one”, as if we knew how to make that happen.
Our will can simply be “you are unable to cause more trouble outside your borders even if you want to”, and we’re awfully close to having achieved that.
We don’t have to choose a “will” that requires thousands of American deaths and tens or hundreds of thousands of Iranian deaths to accomplish. We can choose limited goals and achieve them instead, and the IGRC or whoever can be as delusional as they wish about what happened. It makes no sense to give the enemy a veto over what “winning” looks like by insisting they agree we won, or to choose a form of “winning” that isn’t worth achieving in human life terms whether ours or theirs.
The way to not be cheated by Iran at the peace table is to seek an outcome that doesn’t depend on their cooperation. That’s what Trump fundamentally gets about negotiation that the talking heads don’t. Every day Iran’s BATNA* gets worse and ours gets better. When our BATNA is good enough we don’t need to negotiate anymore.
*Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement
I would posit that the straits are still closed. Last I checked the traffic is 1% of normal. That looks like not losing to me. With the irgc assets dispersed as they are ,they can , not lose, for a long time. Certainly till the socialist retake the house, and then it might look like winning.
@Keith: Last I checked the traffic is 1% of normal.
That “traffic” is only ships with transponders on. It does not count ships moving with transponders off. You don’t have a reliable count looking at websites. You’d actually have to have the kind of intelligence CENTCOM has.
Economic squeeze makes sense for now. No money means no proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and no rebuilding the nuclear program – doesn’t matter that the IRGC doesn’t care about ordinary Iranians starving, they still need cash to pay the guys with guns. Oil sitting around $75 means Trump gets to keep squeezing them without US consumers feeling much of it.
That said, these regimes can run on fear and fanaticism a lot longer than the math would suggest. This buys time and weakens them without blowing things up right before the midterms. Whether it’s enough on its own – I don’t know, and I don’t trust anybody’s predictions on that either way.
Nikitas,
Again you pick nits where none are needed. ” Impose our will” to any casual reader means we beat them into submission until there is no resistance on their part. It’s not at all hard to understand. Don’t be so pedantic.
Victor Davis Hanson says that the Trump administration is just about out of time before the midterms. So this is the last diplomatic go-round with Iran. If Iran messes with the Strait again, Trump will have no choice but to launch that attack he keeps threatening:
_____________________________________
And so [Iran] started threatening the Gulf. At that point, the Gulf freaked out, and they had wanted us to go in there and eliminate Iran. But now that they got hit, they didn’t want to commit with their 600 aircraft and join us because they thought we wouldn’t take them out completely.
So then people came to Trump, I guess this week, and said, “You’re out of time. We’re only 90 days [to midterms]. If you’re going, you got to solve this, and you can’t keep saying this.”
So last week they dreamed up, “We’re just going to unload the greatest military campaign in the air since World War II. We’re going to bomb the [dual-use sites].” And they were—and that panicked Iran, and they say now they’re going to open the strait.
I don’t think you can trust them, but the point is they got the message that now this was the last chance. So if they break this, and I think they will, Trump will have no choice, to have any credibility, unless he continues with that—with that program.
–Victor Davis Hanson, “Iran Has One Last Chance Before Trump Hits Back”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Msf2ncLYYes&t=325s
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I agree with Hanson’s reasoning. We’ll see.
@physicsguy:” Impose our will” to any casual reader means we beat them into submission until there is no resistance on their part. It’s not at all hard to understand.
I appreciate you being so candid about what you think the real aim should be.
CC™-R citing the IRGC and twelver blather about reparations is the mark of a maroon.
Something about writing a check their ass can’t cash. Does CC™-R know what that means?
IRGC doesn’t give two sh1ts to a damn about economic collapse.
They may not be interested in economic collapse, but economic collapse is interested in them.
@ Charles – Indeed.
By “impose your will,” in mean cause your adversary to prefer your terms to continuing to fight.
We’re not there with Iran.
The purpose of this war is to stop Iran from deploying nukes. Israel will be forced to preemptively nuke them. So far, no nukes so… winning.
Chases Eagles – To succeed at preventing Iran from obtaining nukes, this war would have to either escalate into a full-scale regime-change ground invasion or continue indefinitely. Neither of those things is going to happen.
If the goal of the war is to stop Iran from obtaining nukes, the best you can say is that we haven’t lost yet. But the prospects for success are not great.
Bauxite, one day at a time. They don’t have a deployable nuke today. Meanwhile we have commies inside the wire. Our country is awash with violent criminals, both foreign and domestic, aided and abetted by rinos and demsoc. Trump has a full slate.
It is freaking amazing how awesome Bauxite’s (CC™-R maroon) knowledge of conventional wisdom regarding the military and domestic situation in Iran truly is. Because, of course, The Great Orange Whale never does the unconventional or unexpected. (sarc x 11)
“Full scale” and “indefinitely” actually can mean things, or just be short hand for “I’m worried and of course, concerned.”
I would expect that the Department of War, State Department, and the intelligence agencies have more than the two scenarios postulated by CC™-R maroon.
“I would expect that the Department of War, State Department, and the intelligence agencies have more than the two scenarios postulated by CC™-R maroon.”
So would I. But this is the same president who claimed almost six months ago that this would be a four week operation. This is the same military and intelligence apparatus that told us that Iraq would be a “cakewalk” and we would be greeted as liberators.
There are “maroons” about, but they are the folks who maintain their blind faith in Trump despite mountains of evidence that this Iran engagement has, predictably, become a quagmire.
If the Department of “War,” State Department, and intelligence agencies have a better plan, why didn’t we see it months ago?
Bauxite (CC™-R maroon)
“quagmire”
Six (6) months nor six (6) hours does not a quagmire make, except in the mind of a maroon.
Otay, maroon.
You and I are not the deciders, maroon.