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My guess is option 2, framed around a negotiated ‘ceasefire’. Netanyahu said this week that Iran is no longer an existential threat to Israel. That is obviously a lie, the highly enriched uranium they already have hasn’t even been confiscated, the regime is still in place and angrier, etc.
So why make that statement? The only reason you make it is to set up a US withdrawal that isn’t yours choice as something you acquiesce to. The Israel Hezbollah war will continue, and for that reason Iran will likely continue to fire missiles at Israel and vice versa, but the intensity will probably slow down.
Iran will control the strait and it will have nuclear weapons within five years. It may extract tolls from some vessels, although I have my doubts that revenue will flow to the Iranian treasury. The Saudis and other Gulf Arabs will likely build more pipelines, maybe even north through Jordan and Syria to the Mediterranean. The US will be humiliated, especially once the damage to the evacuated bases becomes clear. The GCC nations, especially the weakest, closest US allies and most vulnerable to Iran like Bahrain and Kuwait will probably sign punitive peace deals with the Iranians. So might Saudi. Behind the scenes they will put a lot into air defense.
Oil prices will slowly come down. Trump will claim he killed the Ayatollah and taught the Iranians a lesson they won’t forget, and the navigation issue is for the locals who use the oil to figure out. Nobody in America cares much about the SoH. His base will believe him. Trump has extraordinary political instincts and few personal principles. A steady flow of US deaths in a long war is poison for the same reason that allowing the Pro-Life lobby to try to force a nationwide abortion ban or heavy limits on congress would be political poison when leaving it to the states washes his hands of the issue entirely.
Or put it this way - Trump chickened out of tariffs that would have been far less damaging to him than 10,000 American military deaths in a full or even partial invasion. Why would he TACO the former but not the latter?
Everything you wrote here is very plausible, and it's probably the modal outcome.
Of course, Trump's TACO tendencies are somewhat unpredictable, and it's also plausible that his advisors are telling him something like "sir, we're on the cusp of victory. If we pull out now it will be a defeat, but if we just give it 2 more weeks..."
I doubt Trump has the foresight to understand that logic is how leaders get sucked into quagmires without meaning to.
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I agree with basically all of this, but I doubt they'll have nuclear weapons in 5 years. Mostly bc they can't be allowed to and these air operations are expensive but also "cheap" relative to the headache of them having nukes.
Although maybe they'll dig "Fordow 2: now with blackjack, hookers, and 3km deeper" and pull it off. I have doubts.
I'd definitely be drooling if I was a engineering consulting firm who specializes in pipelines though. They are about to PRINT money criss crossing the middle east with pipelines.
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Seems like a good opportunity to test the theory that Israel has a unique grip on him (directly, or indirectly by way of having a grip on his handlers/the top of the USG apparatus).
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