I may have been the only analyst to predict this in advance. Now pls listen to me carefully.

The US and Israel do not have a theory of victory. There was two very hard-to-solve problems with their war planning. 

• US-Israeli war aims are, preferably, to permanently remove Iran from the ranks of the confrontation states by toppling the regime; failing that, to disarm Iran by destroying its missile arsenal.

• Regime change cannot be accomplished by aerial bombardment. It has never been done. Without ground-force partners, there is no way to control political developments on the ground. Air coercion is simply not up to the task.

• What can be accomplished, if one is prepared to expend much of one’s magazine, is crippling and fragmenting the state. But that expands rather than constrains the possibility space. This is not a path to a clear victory for the Western powers.

• The second problem is even more immediate. This is the issue that the Iranian arsenal is simply too large for the US to disarm it. And now that, as I predicted, they are going for counter-value strikes on soft targets, how do you protect the oil monarchies? And if you can’t do that, then how you contain this? How do you prevent Iran from wrecking financial markets, the world economy, the Trump presidency, and the GOP for a generation?

• There are considerable risks of escalation here. The White House needs to game plan the exit plan here. There is no clear path to victory. And the risks are multiplying by the hour. You are not going to like where this ends up.

 

Everybody is concentrating on the Iranians shutting the Strait of Hormuz. But that’s not the worst case scenario.

@policytensor makes the point that the worst case scenario is that Tehran starts destroying the Gulf’s entire oil and gas infrastructure. The strategic need is there: only the threat of severe pain will make the US stop, and the closer the regime comes to collapse, the higher their risk tolerance will be. Furthermore, as we are now seeing, Saudi, the UAE and other states, save Oman, are co-belligerents.

All the main fields and ports are within short-range missile (or even artillery!) range of the Iranian coast. Furthermore, all those areas are majority Shia, a population that has been brutally oppressed for decades (much like the population in Iran, ironically enough).

So, the worst case scenario is that the Iranians, with some combination of missile/drone attacks and Shia militias start destroying the oil wells and processing infrastructure. I cannot remember who pointed out that when the Iraqis retreated from Kuwait in 91, they set the oil fields on fire and it took a year to put them all out.

If oil markets start pricing this in, the benchmarks—Brent, and then later, WTI—are going to be well north of a hundred.

And what then?

If oil stays there because the Strait is shut long term, then it is possible that Trump imposes export controls on US oil and gas to hold prices down before the midterms. And what then for Europe? No Russian oil and gas, no Gulf oil and gas. Only American, which Trump might stop for political gain. So what then?

This is the worst case scenario, as described by @policytensor. I am less convinced. The Iranians have threatened a big game before and not done it. This time does feel different, but I will believe it when I see it.

Still, we must ask the EU+UK to start considering this possibility.