> ... I think this all hinges on whether or not the Iranians feel that they have enough leverage to exercise yet.

They don't have a navy anymore and they don't have fighter planes anymore. There's only so many missiles they can launch out without revealing where they're launched from. That leaves them with drones: are iranian drones really sufficient to have any leverage?

Why "yet"? As time goes on they've got less and less leverage: they're getting bombed daily. It's not as if they were producing military material faster than it's getting destroyed.

At this point the islamists in Iran (who doesn't represent all iranian people) are menacing of some kind of scorched earth strategy: where they're saying "if you don't stop destroying every military capacity we have and if you begin to moreover attack our non-military infrastructure, we'll prevent other countries in the region from... Having access to water".

I mean: it could be some leverage, but it reeks of desperation to me. They're getting their arses handed to them in this war. "We'll send drones on oil tankers" and "We'll make sure our neighbors, which we already bombed for no reason, now die of thirst" doesn't sound like a genius war strategy to me. Just like hanging iranian athletes publicly doesn't exactly inspire sympathy from the rest of the world and doesn't sound like a sound strategy either: it's obviously to "make a statement" against all the iranians who wish to see the islamists gone and a regime change, but it's not a genius strategy to gain allies among other countries.

As to Trump's political career: he's old, he cannot be president three times. He's already done 5 years and 2 months of his 8 years, that's 2/3 of his 8 years. He's seems to give absolutely zero fuck about anything since a bullet missed him: he's got 2 years and 10 months left as president and I don't see him quitting. Maybe he'll die of old age but I don't see him quitting.

As a sidenote I think we can all agree that senile-autopen-Biden wasn't exactly fit to rule the country either and yet he stayed until the end of his term, barely able to walk or to look at the correct camera. I mean: so far only one president of the US ever resigned. What are the odds that Trump would be the second one? I don't buy it.

And losing the midterms isn't "bringing down a US president": it doesn't mean a new president gets to get elected.

> They don't have a navy anymore

I get where you're coming from in a lot of ways, but the strait (edited) remains closed, and it's not just a perception issue. From this article [0]:

> U.S. officials have previously declared the Iranian Navy to have been rendered combat ineffective, but many of the more than 120 ships it has targeted so far have been larger vessels. Iran has hundreds of fast boats, some of which are armed with short-range anti-ship missiles, as well as artillery rockets and other weapons. They can also be used to lay naval mines. These fleets are inherently harder to find and fix, and do not need large ports to operate from.

Maybe that's why very few ships are still getting through. The rest of the article is a fun read about how A-10s are taking out those small boats, but there's still a whole lot of work left to do. I think Iran still has a lot of asymmetric juice left, and at some point the law of diminishing returns will kick in.

On the other hand it was a war of choice and the U.S. can make their declaration of victory look like whatever they want it to.

[0] https://www.twz.com/air/a-10-warthogs-are-prowling-for-irani...

As Sun Tzu wrote in the Art of War (a much shittier book than Art of the Deal /s), always give your enemy a way out. Otherwise they will fight to their death...

And the Taliban were defeated in Afghanistan too...

Some of the stuff you read on HN...

Their drones are cheap easy to conceal, and can keep the straight closed indefinitely. And what other leverage do they have besides them keeping the straight closed?