Phillips O’Brien thinks the president wants to leave but can’t. He’s accidentally describing why Iran has no cards left to play.
I was up at 0430 this morning with Patton—he does not sleep in, and neither should anyone who takes this country seriously—when I came across a piece from Phillips O’Brien, the St Andrews professor who writes about the Trump Iran strategy as though the president were stumbling through it rather than commanding it. O’Brien’s argument is that Trump wants to declare victory and leave, but can’t, because Iran still threatens shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. He calls this a “strategic prison.”
He points to the Al Salmi tanker attack off Dubai—a single drone hitting a fully loaded VLCC carrying two million barrels of crude—and claims one hit on a $350 million target has the same strategic weight as 11,000 American and Israeli strikes combined. Read that again. He’s saying Iran is so weak it has been reduced to lobbing drones at parked tankers while we’ve destroyed their navy, air force, missile capacity, and three layers of senior leadership. And he thinks they’re winning.
The Victory Conditions Critics Can’t Read
O’Brien devotes considerable space to Trump’s shifting victory conditions, calling it incoherence. The State Department lists four achieved objectives. Trump emphasizes regime change and nuclear elimination. O’Brien sees contradiction. I see what anyone with a background in force projection would recognize: keeping the enemy uncertain about what exactly makes the bombing stop. Trump told reporters three successive Iranian leadership structures are gone. He’s signaled the Strait may not be a precondition for ending operations, then immediately threatened to obliterate every power plant in Iran if it doesn’t reopen. That keeps Tehran guessing, which is the entire point.
And before anyone starts—the president has business interests in the Gulf region, and that has nothing to do with this campaign. Trump Organization properties in Dubai are commercial real estate. The Strait of Hormuz is global security. The people who can’t tell the difference are the same ones calling this a “prison.”
Even the Stimson Center acknowledged that an American withdrawal would actually increase pressure on Iran from its own partners to reopen the Strait. When D.C. think tanks start arguing that Trump leaving is bad for Iran, maybe the professors should pay attention.
Allies Don’t Get a Free Ride
O’Brien wrings his hands over Trump telling MBS to be nice and instructing allies to handle the Strait themselves. France won’t even open its airspace for American weapons transport but expects us to guarantee their fuel supply? Britain withheld air base authorization and now complains about prices at the pump? The president is right: go get your own oil.
O’Brien is a fine historian. But right now, a country with no air force, no navy, and no surviving senior command is being described as holding all the cards because it can hit a parked tanker with a hobby drone. The analysts calling this a trap are the same ones who said the president couldn’t degrade Iran’s military, couldn’t achieve regime change, and couldn’t get allies to take their own security seriously. And yet the critics keep explaining why winning is actually losing. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?
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