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I don't know enough to agree or dispute this, but I would have to agree that regime chance is unlikely. Based on Marco Rubio's statements, it seems like US military leadership is aware of this is well. My sense is that the current war is what the Israelis used to call "mowing the lawn."
I'm pretty skeptical that Iran has both the will and the ability to stop the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf for an extended period of time.
In terms of will, what's striking to me is that Iran apologized for lashing out against other Persian Gulf countries. My impression is that Iran was hoping for the result you predicted (that other countries would pressure the US to lay off Iran) but the actual result was the opposite (other countries pressured the US to step up the attack). Which makes sense. Nobody wants to be seen as giving in to blackmail and in the Middle East, people place a lot of value on their perceived honor. I think that if the Iran lashed out again at other Gulf countries, it would probably backfire in the same way and in fact it's pretty likely that Iran wouldn't even try again. (Edit: By coincidence, right after posting this I heard a report that Iran has attacked a large oil storage facility in Oman. Obviously this changes my thinking about the situation. In fact, I am tempted to delete the whole post and re-think things, but in the interest of epistemic humility I will leave it up.)
In terms of ability, I agree with the others that the US seems to be pretty good at taking out speedboats. I'm not a military expert, but surely the US has been planning for years (and building tools) to deal with the exact situation where Iran tries to stop traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. So I think it's pretty likely that the US has enough countermeasures in place that whatever Iran tries on this score, it won't succeed long term.
I agree with the second half of this, but I think it's pretty unlikely that the first goal will be accomplished. The reason being that Israel is very capable and preventing Iran from getting a bomb is one of Israel's top priorities, if not THE top priority. And if push comes to shove, I doubt Israel will hold back.
As far as Taiwan goes, it seems to me it's difficult to assess that question without knowing how difficult it would be for the US to defend Taiwan against a PRC invasion. You can talk about millions of drones, but who knows how effective they would be against whatever tricks the US Navy has up its sleeve?
There's a big difference between taking out a random speedboat, and taking out every single speedboat.
I don't know enough about military issues to respond definitively to this, but based on my general knowledge of the US militar, I would be pretty surprised if we had to bargain with Iran in order to keep the Strait open.
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Yes, but also no. Minesweeping has been a recognized weakness for a while, and the ships that were supposed to help turned out to be... bad enough many were retired early.
I don't really have the expertise to agree or disagree with this. Except to say that based on my general knowledge about the US military, I would be pretty surprised if we had to bargain with Iran in order to keep the Strait open.
Oh, I'd also be surprised. Just that minesweeping is an area where the USN knows it is a bit weak, that it's an area where an asymmetric foe can exploit, and that it hasn't solved as hoped.
My understanding is that there are three sides to this. The first is that minesweeping is just inherently difficult, for anyone. Even clearing a single mine is difficult, and this becomes vastly more difficult when there's large numbers of them. The second is that the USN in particular has problems with this, as all their attempts to build a dedicated mineclearing ship get cancelled. Maybe it's just not glamorous enough to draw funding? But the third is that the USN doesn't particularly need to be good at this. "Shoot the archer, not the arrow" is the key philosophy. Its a whole lot easier to sink a mine laying boat than to hunt all its individual mines. Thats what we've done to Iran so far. And we have the luxury of operating abroad. If anything, adversaries like China should be afraid the USN would mine its ports, which would completely crash its economy with minimal effort.
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