How the US can win Iran’s war of exhaustion

On Sept. 17, Mohammad Zolghadr, an adviser to Iranian supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei and a former senior commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, told the world when the Strait of Hormuz would reopen.“Our fighters will not reopen the Strait of Hormuz until the criminal Trump and the bloodthirsty Netanyahu are brought down from power,” he said, “and this is the first stage of the Iranian people’s revenge.”Zolghadr does not speak for the whole system. In August, Khamenei ousted him as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and installed Mohsen Rezaei. Eight days after Zolghadr’s threat, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi floated a seven-day plan to reopen the strait if Washington lifts the blockade and sanctions. Tehran is running two tracks at once, and both are real. Araghchi’s track sets the price of the strait. Zolghadr’s tells us what an influential part of the regime thinks should happen after the price is paid.Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh made a similar point in the Wall Street Journal, warning that even an American willingness to negotiate could encourage Iran “to seek more than the president’s humiliation.” A regime seeking only a deal settles once it holds sufficient leverage. A regime seeking revenge may treat leverage as a reason to keep going.The motive is not hard to find, and we should be honest about our part in it. Washington and Jerusalem have already played a version of “for keeps.” The Feb. 28 strikes killed Ali Khamenei and much of his son’s family. They produced a wounded, largely unseen successor and a public commitment to revenge.Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, writing in Foreign Affairs, reported that Iran’s elite now sees Feb. 28 as Israelis see Oct. 7. After a 1981 bombing gutted the regime’s leadership, the survivors concluded that they had to retaliate so severely that no one would try it again. The men running Iran today learned that lesson firsthand.Look at the map. In July, Iranian strikes on bases in Jordan killed three American soldiers, followed by attacks on Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar. On Sept. 2, the United Arab Emirates condemned another wave of Iranian attacks on its neighbors. Six days later, the Houthis struck Saudi oil facilities and wounded 73 people. In August, Iranian Army Cmdr. Amir Hatami announced a $30,000 reward for killing or capturing an American service member.Tehran’s hired criminals have targeted Jews from Sweden to Australia. That is not a regime looking only for an exit. It is widening the contest.Gerecht and Takeyh ask whether Iran can still field the kind of competent operatives who bombed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1992 and the AMIA Jewish community center two years later. Mostly, it cannot. It does not need to.Most of its hired hands will be amateurs. Some will be caught, and some will do minor damage. But each one makes headlines, and now and again, one will land a big hit.I saw this dynamic firsthand in the civil wars in El Salvador and Afghanistan. An insurgent does not necessarily have to win battles. He has to stay in the fight longer than his enemy is willing to, while making every day of that fight cost the other side more than it costs him.A foiled plot costs Tehran a few thousand dollars and a deniable cutout. It costs us years of protective details and armed guards outside synagogues from Paris to Sydney. A cheap Houthi drone forces a multimillion-dollar interceptor. The objective is to wear us out, make us change, and strain our relationships with allies.Tehran has seen this work before. In October 1983, a truck bomb in Beirut killed 241 American service members. By February 1984, President Ronald Reagan had pulled the Marines out of Lebanon.Negotiating with Iran is not the problem. Negotiating only over the symptom is. Hormuz is Tehran’s immediate leverage, but it is not the whole strategy.A settlement that reopens the strait while leaving intact the machinery for bounties, proxy attacks, and external operations risks, exchanging today’s crisis for tomorrow’s. Regime replacement is not Washington’s to deliver either. No one has produced a plausible plan for it, short of an occupation nobody will fund.Wartime nationalism and repression saved this regime during the war with Iraq, and they could do so again. We will therefore live with this regime for now. The question is on whose terms.Living with it on Tehran’s terms means a paper settlement: Hormuz reopens, the blockade lifts, and the Quds Force, external operations networks, and bounty system come through intact. That buys a quiet season while leaving the machinery for the next round in place.Playing for keeps does not mean matching Iran’s escalation step for step. Answering every proxy attack inside Iran raises the odds of a wider conventional war, more American casualties, and a longer Hormuz closure. That is precisely the cost curve Tehran wants to impose.Playing for keeps means winning the contest Iran has actually chosen: a contest of exhaustion.That requires raising the cost of Iran’s external operations and its Hormuz closure faster than Iran can raise the political cost of our staying. Start with intelligence. U.S.-Israeli intelligence integration should focus on the Quds Force officers and Intelligence Ministry networks that recruit operatives abroad and the officials who authorize bounties. Target the machinery, not the country.Then go after the money. Iran’s oil does not slip past the blockade by outrunning warships. It moves through nominee owners, flag registries, ship-to-ship transfers, and brokers servicing the same shadow fleets used by other sanctioned states. Those networks can be disrupted without firing a shot into Iran.There is already evidence that another part of this strategy can work. Gulf oil exports recovered to more than 80% of prewar levels in September as producers improvised shuttle operations, ship-to-ship transfers, and alternative routes. Every barrel that reaches the market despite Tehran’s closure reduces the value of the card Iran is holding.That should be the larger strategy: Engineer around Iran wherever possible while squeezing the networks Iran cannot easily replace.Any settlement worth signing should therefore address a verifiable end to bounties and external operations, not only the strait. Araghchi’s seven-day plan says nothing about either. Washington should not exchange the immediate relief of reopening Hormuz for an intact Iranian apparatus capable of starting the same contest somewhere else.How does this end? Not with a collapse on our timetable. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says Iran is “in a death spiral,” but that is a forecast, not an outcome.Tabaar points instead to Argentina, whose military junta fell after its disastrous 1982 gamble in the Falklands. Iran is not Argentina, and history does not repeat on command. But the strategic principle matters.Iran’s strategy depends on American exhaustion arriving before Iranian exhaustion. Washington’s objective should be to reverse that equation: reduce the value of Hormuz, dismantle the external networks, make proxy warfare more expensive, and deny Tehran the political exhaustion it is trying to manufacture.THE IRAN PEACE DEAL EXPIRES — AND THE CONFLICT ENTERS A DANGEROUS PHASEThe regime is betting that we will tire first.It is playing for keeps. For us, playing for keeps means making sure we don’t.