🇺🇸🇮🇷 U.S. and Israel just dismantled most of Iran’s conventional military leverage.
Leader gone, nukes hit, missiles degraded, command fractured. On paper, that’s a clean, decisive campaign.
And then Iran does the one thing everyone’s been predicting for 30 years: it stops playing on the battlefield and starts playing with the global economy.
Hormuz is the system. You don’t need a formal blockade when a few drones, some mines, and spiking insurance premiums can choke 20% of global oil. Traffic collapses, prices jump, and suddenly military success starts bleeding into political hesitation.
This is the uncomfortable part: tactical dominance doesn’t automatically translate into strategic control. Iran can’t win a conventional fight, but it doesn’t need to.
It just needs to raise the cost high enough that everyone else flinches first.
So the problem shifts. It’s no longer “can you destroy Iran’s capabilities?” It’s “can you remove its leverage?”
That’s where Kharg Island enters the picture. Destroy it and you lose leverage. Seize it and you own the switch: reopen Hormuz or your oil revenue goes to zero.
Messy, high-risk, escalatory. Also logically consistent with the current trajectory.