EuropeFeaturedHither and YoniranIran Nuclear DealoilSteve Witkoff

Five Quick Things: Hormuz | The American Spectator

admin
March 19, 2026
0Points
0
1
Five Quick Things: Hormuz | The American Spectator

I’m not sure that I’m going to make it a policy to turn the 5QT into an Iran war notebook, but I’m doing it for two weeks in a row. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: How’s the Iran War Actually Going?)

At some point, it becomes… not a coincidence but enemy action.

And we’ve got an awful lot of that going on.

So on with the show.

1. Giving It to You Strait

I keep asking this question: if the U.S. and Israel aren’t winning the war and Iran is, then feel free to let us know to whom we should send the trophy.

Yes, but, the response goes, Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, and President Trump and his team had no plan for that.

It’s an awfully dumb argument. For a host of reasons.

But perhaps the most interesting of them is that it might not actually be in our interest for the Strait of Hormuz to be open.

Whaaaat? How can that be?

On Wednesday, John A. Conrad, in an X thread distilled over at RVIVR, did a marvelous job of explaining the multilayered strategic play which is going on…

What if the White House has no intention of reopening the Strait of Hormuz? What if this war is really about ships & tariffs?

I had a long discussion with senior DOE official yesterday on background. I can’t share any details but it’s clear everyone’s Strait of Hormuz calculus is wrong.

We need to go back to the drawing boards.

Conrad goes into a detailed recounting of all of the efforts the Trump administration has made to boost America’s maritime power, making it a key initiative of his presidency but getting blocked and resisted at every turn — on tariffs, fighting global carbon taxes, dealing with the Panama Canal, on Greenland, on Trump’s plan to build the Golden Fleet of new battleships. Some of the resistance has been domestic; a lot more of it was foreign, and specifically, it’s been coming from the London financial markets. (RELATED: Shipping Interruption in Persian Gulf Is Yet Another Reminder of the Risks of Offshoring)

And then…

Strike Iran, and Europe either bends or goes dark in an energy crisis.

The European shipping community and political establishment has spent the last year dismissing, undermining and mocking every Trump maritime initiative.

They scoffed at the USTR tariffs. They laughed at the SHIPS Act. They blocked the IMO exemptions. They refused to take American maritime policy seriously.

Now their energy supply runs through an insurance facility controlled by Washington.

“Let their navies figure it out.” Except everyone knows they can’t. European naval forces are too small, too slow, and too poorly equipped for sustained convoy escort operations through a contested strait.

While the MSM is busy spinning Europe’s failure to participate as a vote against the war… the smart players all know they aren’t sending warships because they can’t.

All the European navies combined couldn’t send more than three ships at a time to defend the Red Sea and an entire German Task Force sailed around Africa to avoid it.

Eventually Europe will have to capitulate to get the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. insurance backstop, to fully reopen the Strait.

And what does “capitulate” look like? The IMO carbon tax. Greenland. Tariff concessions. The SHIPS Act. Every maritime policy priority that Europe and China have been blocking for the past year.

Then on Thursday, Conrad reposted this on X…

There’s a lot here, and of course, it’s true that oil is fungible — so whether you can truly bifurcate or trifurcate an international oil market is questionable.

But if the U.S. Navy can’t be counted on to ensure the free flow of oil through various chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz, then… who gets hurt worse?

The United States of America uses roughly 20 million barrels of oil a day. We produce 22 million barrels. It isn’t quite as simple as that — for example, California gets a good deal of its gasoline from South Korea, of all places — but on net we’re an exporter of oil and a gargantuan exporter of natural gas. What we get from the Strait of Hormuz is almost negligible and certainly replaceable.

But that’s not true of Europe. And it isn’t true of China.

Free flow of oil through all the big choke points around the globe normalizes prices from country to country. Not-so-free-flow? That’s something else entirely.

Read Conrad’s essay. It will open your eyes. There is an enormous game afoot, one which is being utterly ignored in the media coverage of the war and the stupid narratives being pushed.

2. Kharg Island

The huge military strike on the plot of land through which 80 percent of Iran’s oil exports flow is said to have blown apart all of the military defenses at Kharg Island, and virtually everyone seems to think what’s coming next is a Marine landing on the island.

An interesting video discussion…

It’s foreseeable that a seizure of Kharg Island would put an end to the war. Once the Marines took it, there is virtually no prospect of Iran taking it back by force, and certainly there is no prospect of Iran retaking Kharg without destroying the oil facilities that load as many as 10 supertankers simultaneously.

And if the U.S. were to hold Kharg Island, it would be the U.S. actually selling the oil that would leave there and taking a cut of the proceeds before determining who gets paid for the black gold.

Which probably wouldn’t be the regime.

Without that revenue flow, the regime can’t pay its enforcers. It doesn’t matter how fanatical the adherents are; if they aren’t fed and watered, they won’t last long.

Why haven’t we moved on Kharg yet? Well, see #1. And there are logistical reasons we haven’t.

One of them is that the Marine Expeditionary Unit being sent to the Middle East isn’t there yet. Another being that the Iranian coastal defenses — drone bases and missile batteries, specifically — which would be capable of inflicting casualties on our invasion force, still need attrition.

Which leads us to something cool.

3. The Warthog

It will go down in history that the attempts to decommission the A-10 Thunderbolt, which is more commonly known as the Warthog, were among the dumbest ideas anybody ever had at the Pentagon.

It’s an ancient airframe, but that matters little. Here it is 2026, and we have brought the Warthog to the fight over Iran — to quality effect.

Another video worth watching…

As the video discusses, the A-10 has a range of 800 miles, can refuel in midair, and specializes in loitering over the battlefield with a huge array of weaponry — a 30 mm cannon and a host of different bombs and missiles. It was developed as a tank-killer, but its skill set includes the ability to hit stationary ground targets, flying drones, and surface ships.

The A-10 is a solution for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, to be sure, but with control over the skies above southern Iran, it could be decisive in providing the surface support a landing force on Kharg Island would need.

And to think they wanted to decommission this wonder weapon.

Oh — and something else has happened…

4. The Besieged Basij

Israel has made it a priority, leveraging their near-total intelligence penetration of the Iranian regime and the precision weaponry of their air force, to decapitate the regime in a steady stream of airstrikes.

The de facto leader of Iran, Ali Larijani, was taken out in one of those strikes earlier this week. Following Larijani’s demise, two successive commanders of the Basij, which is the thug militia primarily responsible for harassing and brutalizing the Iranian people on the streets, have been sent to the Land of Dirtnaps — the last one on his first full day on the job.

What’s stunning is that some of Israel’s intelligence is coming from ordinary Iranians, who are posting coordinates of Basij roadblocks and checkpoints so that Israeli drones could take them out.

And two images indicate how dramatic the effect has been.

One is an indication of where the morale of ordinary Basij soldiers is at present…

The regime might not be getting the best efforts at internal security if the security forces are hiding under bridges and waving white flags as the Israeli drones buzz overhead.

And then there is this…

Are these two videos real? It’s hard to say.

This morning, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was on air with Maria Bartiromo, and he noted reports of defections within Iran’s security structure…

Is Bessent telling the truth?

You can judge that for yourself. Clearly, there are internal problems with the Iranian regime, given the rolling death toll among its leadership. And if people are really recording themselves conducting drive-by shootings of regime thugs, and it’s not just a one-off, this is likely to progressively disintegrate.

5. Joe Kent

In the last of the things in the 5QT, which appeared a week ago, we talked about the propaganda war, which is the one thing the Iranians are winning so far.

They did get a big victory when Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, abruptly resigned and then went on Tucker Carlson’s show to make a host of statements trashing the war effort — perhaps most notably that Iran wasn’t a particular threat to U.S. security.

I’m not going to litigate Kent’s statements. If you want to believe he’s a hero speaking truth to power, I doubt I’d convince you otherwise. The fact that Kent had taken very different positions regarding Iran not long ago doesn’t help his argument. And the fact that he’d been frozen out of classified access due to suspicion that he was the source of intelligence community leaks, including perhaps the Signalgate fiasco last year, and his boss, Tulsi Gabbard, had apparently been told to fire him, also doesn’t help.

Kent might be telling the truth, even with all that. Maybe this war is unnecessary.

But a point I’m not seeing made hardly at all, and when it is made it’s dismissed by the Left and the Tehran Caucus on the Right alike and I can’t understand it, is that unless you think Steve Witkoff is a liar — and so is everybody else who sat at the peace table with the Iranians last month — this war is especially entirely Iran’s fault if they weren’t actually the nuclear threat we’re saying they were.

Remember, if Witkoff is telling the truth, the Iranians told him they had enough enriched nuclear material that in two more weeks of running their centrifuges, they’d be able to make 11 bombs, and that they weren’t going to stop and that we couldn’t stop them. They said this knowing not only that Trump had vowed he’d never let them have a nuke, but the Israelis had made the same vow, and it’s one of the few consensus items in American politics that Iran had to be stopped from getting a nuke. (RELATED: US–Iran Talks Only Lead to Uncertainty)

And if those representations were a bluff, then it was the dumbest and most self-destructive bluff in world history.

How could those brilliant Iranians have miscalculated so badly? Or are they not actually very brilliant after all?

A lot is made of the intelligence community’s assessments, as though those should govern our geopolitical and national security strategic decisions. Except we’ve known for a long time that our intel isn’t all that reliable — and that the people in the intel community could be a little more loyal to the commander in chief when his name is Donald J. Trump.

It’s entirely reasonable that Trump would take Witkoff’s counsel rather than that of the intel community, given his experiences — and given the great game he’s playing with China and London.

Just win, baby. Win, and the Joe Kents don’t matter.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

Death of a Charlatan

Darkness Before the Light in Cuba

Five Quick Things: How’s the Iran War Actually Going?



Source link

admin

Related Posts

1 of 1,828

TRENDING

Copyright © 2026 right2024 - .
Copyright © 2026 right2024 - .