In his piece, "Belmont Club: The Horns of Hormuz," Richard Hernandez explains Iran's dilemma regarding shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Noting that an attack on U.S. ships would re-up the President's authorities under the War Powers Act, Hernandez writes:
Iran would be caught on the horns of a dilemma – the Horns of Hormuz as it were: to let the ships pass or by opposing them, give Donald Trump a 60-day renewable permit to pound the Islamic Republic into dust. Accepting either course would likely be fatal to the Islamic Republic. If Tehran lets the ships pass unmolested, the Strait will be closed only to them and open to everyone else. They would have blockaded themselves!
Given an uninterrupted blockade, the Islamic Republic would be slowly starved into submission, if not this month then the next, while the rest of the world does business without them. But if they attack the merchant ships “guided by the USN,” even if they succeed in scoring hits (which is by no means certain), then they will only have succeeded in repeatedly unleashing a force camped outside its borders free to resupply itself, while they must make do with salvaged weapons and improvised defenses.
And as we know, Iran has chosen to further pounded by U.S. bombs and missiles. But Hernandez believes the blockade will be the greater weapon over the long run, noting that "[o]ne of the enduring lessons of the Navy’s institutional memory was its post-WW2 realization that the naval blockade of Japan, much more than the bombing of cities by B-29s, was responsible for the surrender of Japan."
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