Iran’s Economy: Conservatorship or Destruction — They Can Decide
Previous pieces in this series:
Those five pieces built the case for action and diagnosed the ceasefire trap. This one answers the question they left open: what does the endgame actually look like?
The Framework: Conservatorship
The United States should place Iran’s oil and natural gas economy under permanent conservatorship. Conservatorship — permanent external control of Iran’s oil export infrastructure, with revenue directed to approved uses and supervised compliance as the only alternative to destruction.
The word matters. Conservatorship implies what the evidence supports: that the Iranian regime has demonstrated, across four decades and ten American presidencies, that it cannot be trusted to manage its own economic resources without weaponizing them. A bankrupt entity placed under court supervision does not get to vote on the terms of its own receivership. It complies or it loses the asset entirely.
The Iranian people may have buyer’s remorse. That is their problem, not ours. They chose this regime.
The mechanism is straightforward. U.S. naval forces encircle and seize Kharg Island, which handles roughly 90% of Iranian oil exports. The offer to Tehran is simple: accept unrestricted conservatorship or lose their oil and gas economy entirely.
The Alternative: Destruction
If Iran resists, the infrastructure is destroyed. Permanently. Not damaged — destroyed.
At that point the responsibility is entirely Tehran’s. The terms were survivable — the clerics could keep their government, keep their ideology, keep their country. They simply could not keep exporting violence funded by their nation’s oil wealth.
If they choose resistance over compliance, they choose rubble. That is not an American decision. It is an Iranian one.
Iran: Decide
Conservatorship or destruction.