On Iran, Trump's hard-headedness is smart....

Targeting the fanatical Tehran regime's foreign currency reserves, transportation sector, minerals, and debt, these sanctions will restrict Iran's ability to threaten regional and international security...also send a clear message to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that American appeasement has ended.

Iran now knows that Trump means business. It knows that when Trump speaks of a new and better nuclear agreement that eliminates former President Barack Obama's Potemkin inspections of nuclear or ballistic missile sites and replaces them with real ones, he means it....the mullahs know that they are under extreme and increasing international and domestic pressure.

We are optimistic, largely because new sanctions on Iranian oil exports will enter force this November. And while Iran has responded to that prospect with threats to close critical energy supply routes, America has the ability, and now also the will, to restrain those threats.

And while Iran has responded to that prospect with threats to close critical energy supply routes...

Closing the Straits of Hormuz was once enough of an existential threat to bring on a war. It is a measure of just how much the world has changed that Trump can now state that doing so will hurt Iran more than it will the rest of the world, excepting of course certain neighbors of Iran who will not be pleased at all, and who may very well respond with efforts to export revolution back to the very ones who have been exporting it themselves for nearly 40 years now and have impoverished their country in doing so.

People who weren't in it tend to forget the effects of the 1973 oil embargo on the targets: rampant inflation, and the sort of economic damage that the sudden quadrupling of the price of a strategic material will cause to planning and resource allocation. When Iran fell to the mullahs shortly thereafter, and before recovery had even taken hold, the importance of this issue was exacerbated. That power is now severely diminished, and so is its potential as a cause of world economic dislocation and war.

Even so, the fact that Trump can even contemplate placing this much pressure on Iran this way is damning evidence of the irresponsibility of the Iranian government. Exporting revolution costs money, lots of it, and the bill has come due in the form of their vulnerability. Overdue, in fact.

To close the Strait of Hormuz could cause a military response since our military commanders have openly stated their determination to keep the waterway open........” to ensure freedom of navigation and the “free flow of commerce”.

Actually Iran floated closing the strait in 2012 when Obama set a range of sanctions against Iran then. So this tactic isn't new.

I looked up the figures regarding the Straits....looks like about 25% of the world’s total oil exports and more than 40 % of the world’s seaborne crude goes thru there..At its narrowest point the straits narrow to only about 31 miles wide. So there's that as well. Legally Iran can't close them....but we shall see perhaps.

Just one flight of F-18's can neutralize all 100 of the speedboats that Iran has purchased and if we wish to further inflict pain we can take out that pitiful oil refining capabilities they have for local consumption.

The world weapons is a far more technologically advanced that when those towel heads grabbed power and started their bluster of blocking the straits. Saudi Arabia is mightily pissed at Iran and desperately is seeking to give them a good bloody nose but they need the key player of Israel to help get it done.

If they're stupid enough to get that stupid, there's a proven tactic that harkens back to WW2 - bombing the snot out of their naval bases. That's how the Mediterranean was sacked up away from the Germans, our amphib operations & task forces protected from the Japs. Let's see how they can mount and maintain any sortie when their naval infrastructure is wreckage.

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