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It's an interesting question: what should Ayatollah Motteizan do?
Some things are obvious: lean more into the most successful military strategies, reevaluate the ineffective ones.
I'd personally just go full globohomo: money under the American aegis is nice. Get a luxurious villa on the Caspian, drink nice Shiraz every evening watching the sunset. But clearly they have deeper/different values from that, so that's a nonstarter.
Five years from now, the strait shutdown strategy will be weakened; regional competitors and global consumers will be developing alternative routes, and you can't rely on them as much to pressure Israel and the US to chill out. It would be nice to have something beyond that threat.
Maybe I'd want to pull in China: give them whatever ports they want, to create some kind of security guarantee. But if I'm China, it seems like an undesired entanglement; I want to be less, not more, invested in Middle Eastern oil politics. Probably not a viable option.
What about nukes? Definitely would be very nice to have a couple dozen. But it's not like Iran was holding back before in its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and it's not even clear that they could effectively deliver them to Tel Aviv if they had them. I just don't see a real path to go from where Iran is and has been to the point where they have a nuclear deterrent.
What probably would be best, given Ayatollah values, would be to take the opportunity to shore up the economy and regime support. Avoid shaking up regional politics, while domestically ruling as you want.
The problem that IRGC Colonel Mottezen has is that the Iranian people remember all the fingernails he pulled out for God, and the United States remembers those 40 years of him being an intractable pain in the ass. Neither one of them want him administering the new globo-homo wonderland Iran. The first second they get the chance him and his entire family are going to be hanging from construction cranes. And he knows this.
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If it were me I’d have been more hawkish than Khamenei was but the forestalling of any nuclear weapons pursuit is expedient due to the likelihood of kicking off nuclear proliferation of the region which would worsen things overall for all parties in the near geographic vicinity. Their heavy asymmetrical investment in drone warfare is proving to be very resourceful and efficient.
Why do the Iranian top leaders care about regional nuclear proliferation? They are going to be killed by conventional bombs in the opening strikes whenever the next war happens, their only interest is developing an effective enough deterrent to prevent that war from happening.
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Their drone warfare has the same limitations as other air warfare -- you can't make lasting gains with it. Their best use of that was to close Hormuz, and it wasn't sufficient (and does almost nothing to Israel). It will be even less useful in the future as the Gulf countries build more pipelines to avoid the bottleneck. If they want to achieve aggressive goals (e.g. destroying Israel), they need either a nuke or more than air power. They could take Iraq if the US looked the other way (one might argue they already have Iraq), but I don't see them getting sufficient force across Syria and/or Jordan.
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