On Tuesday, Aug.25, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S.
Navy has removed or detonated every Iranian mine in the international waters of the Strait of Hormuz.Tankers are moving again, gas prices should finally start to ease and Washington will be tempted to exhale.
That would be a mistake.It took the most powerful navy on Earth six months to undo Tehran’s damage to the strait.
The 60-day negotiating window produced nothing, Iran's foreign ministry said the deadline "essentially has no relevance," and the regime that just lost this round is already winding the next clock.I know that clock.My family lived under it before we fled Iran, a Jewish family that watched the revolution turn our homeland into a place where we could no longer safely exist.Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and the rest of the regime leadership are not trying to beat the American military; they are trying to outlast the American taxpayer, and the regime is banking its survival on exactly that.TRUMP OPENS HORMUZ UNDER FIRE WITH ‘PROJECT FREEDOM’ AS IRAN WARNS OF ATTACKSA year after Operation Midnight Hammer and the 12-Day War showed the world what American power can do in a matter of days, the American public’s worst fear is materializing anyway: a drawn-out conflict.
The strait may be reopening, but the squeeze of the past six months reached pocketbooks nationwide, midterm elections are approaching and Washington is debating how, and how fast, to prosecute this war.Ships are anchored in the Strait of Hormuz on August 10, 2026, off the coast of Bandar Abbas, Iran.(Ali Saeedi/Getty Images)The longer this war runs, the more the Iranian regime gains.
The only question that matters is whether America fights the war Tehran designed or the war America can win.Since 1979, the dictatorship has run the same play, which U.S.
officials have long described as "deception, defiance and delay." Buy time, bleed the adversary, survive to rebuild.The arithmetic of this war was built for that ...