Iran: The Bill Has Come Due
In my last piece — Nation Building: You Can’t Build What They Don’t Want — I argued that the foreign policy establishment has spent eighty years stapling reconstruction fantasies to the back of military force and then blaming the military when the fantasies failed. The lesson isn’t that force doesn’t work. It’s that force paired with nation-building worked exactly once, at the end of World War 2, and the establishment has been chasing that result ever since.
Iran is where that lesson needs to be applied right now.
Not because we want a war with Iran. We don’t. Not because diplomacy hasn’t been tried. It has — across eleven presidential administrations, 47 years, every conceivable combination of carrots and sticks. But Iran today fields more capable missiles, funds more dangerous proxies, and runs a more advanced nuclear program than it did when the Shah fell in 1979. The diplomacy produced the opposite of its stated objectives. At some point the evidence closes the argument.
Here’s what 47 years actually produced: a regime that has absorbed every sanction, every expulsion, every maximum pressure campaign, and every diplomatic initiative — and emerged from each one still funding Hezbollah, still spinning centrifuges, still paying proxy armies across five countries. The tools changed. The result didn’t.
At some point the definition of insanity applies — doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
The Wrong Question
Washington’s entire Iran policy has been built around one question: how do we pressure Iran into changing its behavior?
That’s the wrong question. It assumes the regime is a rational actor that will eventually respond to sufficient pain by moderating. The evidence — nearly five decades of it — says otherwise. The regime’s external aggression isn’t a policy preference it might negotiate away.
There is also no surgical option. There never was. The foreign policy establishment has spent that entire time searching for the intervention that applies just enough pressure to change behavior without consequences — without pain, without disruption, without anyone inside or outside Iran getting hurt. That option does not exist. Iran has deliberately embedded itself in global energy markets, regional proxy networks, and Chinese supply chains precisely to make surgical action impossible. The complexity isn’t accidental. It’s the strategy. Every layer of entanglement is a deterrent against clean solutions.
The search for the surgical option is itself part of the technical debt. Every year spent looking for the clean answer was a year the messy answer got more expensive. Anyone still proposing targeted sanctions, diplomatic off-ramps, or calibrated pressure as a serious solution in 2026 is not offering an alternative. They are proposing to extend the debt further.
The right question is: how do we make it impossible for Iran to afford the behavior we’re trying to stop?
That’s a different problem with a different solution. And the solution is straightforward, even if the execution isn’t: destroy the economy. Not sanction it. Not pressure it. Destroy it — sequentially, proportionally, with each stage triggered by Iranian behavior, and each stage designed to be as damaging as possible at minimum cost to us.
How You Destroy an Economy
Iran’s external threat capability runs on oil money. Not ideology — money. Cut the money and the proxies stop. Cut the money and you cut everything it purchases — simultaneously, automatically, without having to chase each program individually around the country.
This is the strategic insight that the four-objectives, whack-a-mole approach misses entirely. You don’t need to separately destroy the missile program, defund the proxies, set back the nuclear program, and degrade power projection capability one at a time. You pull the financial foundation out from under all of them at once. No money means no missiles and no proxies and no nuclear program. One mechanism. Four problems degraded simultaneously.
Iran currently exports roughly 1.5 to 1.6 million barrels of oil per day. Almost all of it goes to China, laundered through a shadow fleet of tankers with spoofed transponders, ship-to-ship transfers near Malaysia, and UAE shell companies obscuring the origin. Kharg Island handles roughly 90% of those exports. Iran has secondary export capacity at Bandar Abbas and the Jask terminal — Jask built specifically to bypass Hormuz — plus small-scale pipeline and smuggling routes. Destroying Kharg doesn’t eliminate exports. It cripples primary export capacity and forces Iran onto slower, costlier, more interdictable alternatives. That is the point. Each alternative route is less efficient, more exposed, and easier to shut down in subsequent stages.
The constraint has never been capability. It has been political will.
Stage One: Pull the Pin
Destroy Kharg Island. Destroy the shadow fleet wherever it can be found and interdicted. Destroy the key refinery and storage infrastructure that feeds the export chain.
This is the cheapest, most surgical option available. No ground troops. No occupation. No nation-building. A sustained air and naval strike campaign against defined, targetable assets. Expensive in ordnance, manageable in risk, devastating in effect.
Iran goes from roughly $40–50 billion in annual oil revenue to a fraction of that — forced onto secondary routes at higher cost, lower volume, and greater interdiction risk. Existing reserves — best estimates put usable liquid reserves at $10-20 billion, with additional yuan-denominated credits trapped in Chinese banks — combined with dramatically reduced export income, start a clock the regime cannot stop.
Then we wait.
Do not automatically proceed to the next stage. Apply Stage One and watch what happens. If Iran stops funding proxies, stops missile development, stops the nuclear program — you’ve achieved the objective at minimum cost. Unlikely, given the evidence. But the option exists, and leaving it open costs nothing.
The burden of escalation belongs to Tehran. Every subsequent stage is a choice they make, not one we make.
The Test After Stage One
If they don’t stop, go to Stage Two.
Stage Two: The Blockade
A naval blockade is more expensive and more escalatory than Stage One. It requires sustained carrier battle group presence, interdiction of all maritime traffic into Iranian ports, and neutralization of Iran’s asymmetric naval capability — fast boats, mines, shore-based anti-ship missiles along the Gulf coastline.
Then we wait. Same test. If they don’t stop, go to Stage Three.
Stage Three and Beyond
If somehow the regime is still functioning — continue shutting down alternate export routes, tighten the blockade, target remaining IRGC economic infrastructure. The options are available.
But frankly, Stage Three should never happen. A country that has lost its primary oil export infrastructure and been under naval blockade is bankrupt. The regime cannot fund a nuclear program, pay proxy armies, or maintain a missile arsenal on empty reserves and blocked ports. Stage Three is the contingency plan for a scenario that the first two stages should make impossible.
What This Is Not
It is not nation-building. There is no reconstruction plan attached to this. What Iran looks like on the other side is not our problem and never was. We are not in the business of determining Iranian governance. We are in the business of ensuring that whatever government runs Iran cannot afford to threaten its neighbors. Those are completely separate questions and conflating them is exactly how half a century of policy failure happened.
It is not a forever war. The exit condition is simple and measurable: when Iran demonstrably cannot project force beyond its borders, the active campaign ends and monitoring begins. No victory parades. No reconstruction conferences. Monitoring and deterrence.
It is not unprovoked. Iran funded October 7th. Iran directs Houthi attacks on global shipping. Iranian proxies have attacked U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria hundreds of times. We are not contemplating action against a peaceful country. We are contemplating cutting off an active belligerent’s war funding — which is the most restrained available response to what Iran has already been doing for decades.
A Note on the Present Moment
This piece was written as advocacy. As of March 9, 2026 — ten days into Operation Epic Fury — it reads as a roadmap being executed in real time. Kharg Island strikes are actively under discussion. The Strait of Hormuz is at near-standstill. IRGC command centers and missile sites have been hit. The sequential logic described here is playing out, stage by stage, whether by design or convergent reasoning.
Current events suggest that the proposal put forth in this op-ed may well be the thinking of the administration. What they haven’t done is be honest with the American public that this is the plan.