The last 48 hours have provided us with a clear picture of Trump’s strategy for Iran and the broader military and economic vision he seeks to implement.
On the pace of the Iran operation: I assumed Kharg would follow the fires phase on roughly a 72-hour timeline. Seize the oil hub, establish a forward position, hold it as a base for what comes next. That logic still makes military sense. But I am now less confident the White House wants to move that fast, and the reason has nothing to do with military capacity. We have more than enough to take Kharg whenever we choose. The question is whether we want to take it, or whether we want to hold the threat of taking it.
On the leadership targeting: Israel killed Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, and Gholamreza Soleimani, commander of the Basij paramilitary force, in overnight strikes on Tehran. These are not second-tier figures. Larijani was widely believed to be the man actually running Iran as it reeled from the killing of its supreme leader. He had served as parliament speaker, as Iran’s lead nuclear negotiator with the West, and as the closest strategic adviser to Khamenei before Khamenei was killed on day one of the operation. Soleimani led the Basij for seven years, the force used to crush waves of civilian protest, and killing him further strains the command and control of the internal security apparatus that would be crucial in putting down any uprising against the theocracy.
Netanyahu said it plainly: these strikes are designed to give the Iranian people the opportunity to remove their own government. You can debate the timeline on that. But the architecture being built, leadership decapitation plus Basij command disruption plus the special operations coordination is coherent and sequential. Each piece enables the next.
Now, to the infrastructure question, which is where we are gaining so much insight into Team Trump’s strategy.
Look at Venezuela. Look at Cuba. The pattern this administration has established is not to destroy infrastructure it intends to use. When we went into Venezuela for the Maduro extraction, we did not bomb the oil facilities. We did not crater the ports. We left the productive capacity intact because we understood that Venezuelan oil is an instrument, and instruments do not work when they are rubble.
Kharg Island was built by American engineers. There is a historical irony in that worth sitting with. The infrastructure that controls a third of the world’s seaborne oil exports was designed and constructed with American expertise, and it has never been bombed in this operation despite the fact that we could reduce it to scrap metal in an afternoon. That is not an accident. That is a policy.
The South Pars strikes this week illuminate the distinction perfectly. Israel bombed Iranian facilities linked to South Pars, the largest natural gas field in the world, in what was described as a significant escalation. Trump publicly said Israel acted out of anger and will not strike South Pars again. Read that carefully. Trump is not upset that South Pars was struck because he is squeamish about escalation. He is upset because South Pars, like Kharg, is infrastructure he wants to control, not destroy. An Israeli source told CNN the strike was carried out in coordination with the United States, directly contradicting Trump’s public claim that the U.S. knew nothing about it. So we have the U.S. aware of the strike, Trump publicly distancing himself from it, and Trump simultaneously threatening to blow up South Pars entirely if Iran keeps attacking Qatar. That is not contradiction. That is leverage management. The threat of total destruction is the negotiating position. Actual destruction forfeits the asset.
Iran retaliated by attacking Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world’s largest LNG export complex, causing extensive damage, and also struck energy facilities in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait. Analysts at Wood Mackenzie said the attacks fundamentally reshape the global LNG outlook, with disruption to global natural gas supply now likely to last longer than two months. Iran is doing to the Gulf states what the Gulf states failed to do to themselves: forcing them to choose a side. Qatar expelled Iran’s military attaches in response. Saudi Arabia warned that its patience is not unlimited. The coalition the White House could not assemble through diplomacy is being assembled by Iranian missiles.
The policy is this: we want the oil to flow when we say it can flow, and we want it to stop when we say it stops. A destroyed Kharg is an oil crisis. A Kharg under American effective control is a lever, and levers are far more valuable than craters.
This connects to something John Konrad argued on X that I think is right, and that most of the mainstream analysis has missed entirely.
The calculus around Hormuz is not primarily about Iran. It is about China. It has always been about China. China imports roughly 40 percent of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz. Every hour the strait remains closed at American discretion is an hour Beijing understands something it has never had to fully internalize before: that the United States Navy holds a veto over the Chinese economy, and that the cost of challenging American primacy is not abstract. It flows through a chokepoint, and we are standing at the valve.
But there is a second layer to the China problem that the television analysts are not discussing. China has been purchasing Gulf oil in yuan, not dollars. That arrangement, carefully cultivated over years of petrostate diplomacy, is one of the central pillars of Beijing’s long-term strategy to erode dollar dominance in global commodity markets. A closed strait does not just cut off the physical supply. It cuts off the yuan-denominated transaction flow that underpins the whole architecture. When Iranian and Gulf oil cannot move, the petrodollar alternative Beijing has been constructing stalls with it.
The damage to China is not only energy. It is monetary.
This is the same logic as the Panama Canal. The same logic as Greenland. Trump has been consistent about this in a way his critics refuse to take seriously. These are not impulsive provocations. They are a coherent strategy of repositioning American power at the chokepoints that control the global economy. Panama controls the Atlantic-Pacific transit. Greenland covers the Arctic corridor. Hormuz feeds Asia. Venezuela’s oil is a Western Hemisphere supply question with direct implications for what Beijing can access and at what price.
Now, the objection I hear from the never-Trump crowd goes like this: yes, but high oil prices help Russia. Sure. They do. Russia is a petrostate and high global prices pad Moscow’s revenues. That is true and worth acknowledging. But the people making this argument never finish the math. High oil prices help the United States more. We are the world’s largest oil producer. American energy companies, American royalty streams, American export revenues, and the broader industrial base that runs on domestic production all benefit when global prices rise. The argument that we should accept strategic weakness at the chokepoints in order to deny Russia a margin improvement is the kind of reasoning that has produced thirty years of foreign policy failure. Russia gets a better balance sheet. We get control of the global energy architecture. Those are not equivalent outcomes.
The LNG dimension is actually where the American economic advantage becomes most pronounced, and it is being almost entirely ignored in the coverage. The United States is the world’s largest LNG exporter. When Qatar’s Ras Laffan goes dark and European buyers are scrambling, they are not scrambling toward Russia. They are scrambling toward us. We signed a fifty-plus billion dollar energy supply agreement with Japan recently, and that deal looks more valuable by the hour as Asian and European buyers compete for reliable supply from stable, non-warzone producers. The disruption that is devastating Qatar’s export position is a commercial windfall for American LNG producers and the ports and infrastructure built to serve them.
This matters for the Russia argument too. Europe spent 2022 in genuine terror that Moscow would cut off their gas entirely. The United States stepped into that gap, and the political leverage that came with reliable American LNG supply reshaped the transatlantic relationship in ways that are still unfolding. What is happening now accelerates that process by an order of magnitude. Russia can threaten to withhold gas. Iran can close the strait. Qatar can be struck into temporary silence. But American LNG, flowing from the Gulf Coast through long-term contracts, is none of those things.
The energy architecture the White House is building in this conflict is not just about oil. It is about making the United States the indispensable supplier to every major economy that cannot afford to depend on unstable producers. That is a position worth more than any short-term price spike, and it compounds over decades.
And here is where the analysis gets domestic in a way that should matter to every American who thinks about where this lands politically. High oil prices do not land equally across the country. They never have. Konrad notices this, and he is right to flag it. Red states with direct pipeline access to domestic production, states sitting on the Permian, the Bakken, the Eagle Ford, see energy prices stabilize or fall as export LNG that would normally leave the country stays home and domestic supply floods the market. Blue states, and California is the clearest example, are more exposed to Pacific Basin import pricing and have spent a decade making themselves more dependent on global price signals through policies that restricted domestic extraction and pipeline capacity. The Hormuz closure does not hit Midland, Texas the same way it hits Los Angeles. Not even close. The voters who sent Trump back to Washington are, in the aggregate, more insulated from the global price spike than the voters who are sending their representatives to the floor to demand he reopen the strait immediately.
That is not a coincidence. It is the geometry of the American energy map colliding with the geography of American politics. The White House did not engineer this outcome, but they are not unhappy about it either.
There is something clarifying about watching which nations have raised their hands and which have gone quiet. Estonia, a country of 1.4 million people with three aging Sandown-class minesweepers purchased from the Royal Navy two decades ago, has said publicly and repeatedly that it is ready to talk, ready to help, ready to show up. Denmark is pushing the EU to form a coherent response. Finland’s president is offering a direct trade: European support at Hormuz in exchange for American backing on Ukraine. These are small nations with real commitments, and their willingness to step forward while France, Germany, and the broader EuroLeft issue press releases about dangerous escalation tells you everything you need to know about who actually understands what is at stake.
The nations closest to Russia, the ones who have stared down a land border with a revanchist empire and chosen to spend real money on real defense, are the ones raising their hands in the Persian Gulf. The nations who spent thirty years freeloading on American security guarantees while lecturing Washington about multilateralism are the ones demanding we consult them before we act and then declining to act themselves.
But here is the bottom line that no one in the European press wants to print. The Arab states whose economies depend on Hormuz cannot open it. The European nations whose energy security depends on Hormuz cannot open it. Germany asked plaintively what a handful of European frigates could do that the U.S. Navy cannot. That is exactly the right question and exactly the wrong framing. The answer is nothing. They can do nothing. They could not open the strait without us if their economies depended on it, and their economies do depend on it. China, for all its bluster about Taiwan and naval expansion, cannot keep the U.S. Navy out of that strait, and everyone in Beijing knows it. The United States Navy holds the only key that actually works. We can open Hormuz tomorrow, or we can leave it closed and let the world come to terms with what that means.
Both are choices. One of them is leverage. The nations lecturing us about recklessness are the same nations that promised they could deter Russia from Greenland, contain Chinese naval expansion in the Pacific, and manage Middle Eastern stability without American involvement. That track record is the reason we are the ones standing at the valve.
The person who understands that Kharg intact and under American operational control is worth ten times what a bombed Kharg is worth is not a pacifist. He is a strategist. Destruction is cheap. Control is expensive and valuable. The South Pars episode proves the principle: even when Israel pushes past the line, Trump’s instinct is to reassert the limit. Because what comes after the rubble is not American leverage. It is a global energy crisis with no one holding the valve.
So I hold the framework of “The Next Week” on the military sequencing. The fires phase, the airborne operations, the special operations architecture, all of that remains sound and is visibly unfolding. But I am revising my confidence about the pace and intent around Kharg. The Marines are capable. The question the White House is sitting with is whether the threat of what we can do is more useful, for longer, than the act of doing it.
The Larijani killing answers part of that question. You take out the man running the nuclear negotiations, the man coordinating the strategic response, the man the international community had any chance of talking to, and you take out the commander of the internal suppression force in the same 24-hour window. That is not a war of attrition. That is a targeted removal of the capacity for coherent regime response and coherent regime survival. You are not trying to defeat Iran. You are trying to make Iran ungovernable for the people currently governing it, while leaving the infrastructure intact for whoever comes next.
For the Iranian people, I still pray for what I wrote at the end of that essay. A swift end. A genuine transition. The Islamic Republic has spent 46 years treating the Strait as its sovereign instrument of terror, and that era is ending one way or another. But for the men in the room making these decisions, Kharg is not just a military objective. It is a piece on a board that extends from Caracas to the Arctic to the Persian Gulf, and the move that looks like restraint may be the most aggressive play of all.
Control, not destruction. That is the real Trump doctrine.
