President Donald Trump speaks with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia Keith Kellogg, and others in the Oval Office, Monday, July 21, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)
It’s not always easy to tell when President Trump is making a joke. What started as his claim to the “Gulf of America” turned out to be entirely serious, though not many map makers have signed on.
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Now Mr. Trump is going on about the Strait of Hormuz, saying that he may eventually declare the Strait to be American territory. Iran, to say the least, is not amused. It claims the Strait as its own territorial waters and has effectively closed the Strait for several months. Only a few ships go through it and Iran demands that they pay a toll amounting to millions of dollars per ship. U.S. naval vessels have attacked ships going into Iran.
As Gen. Keith Kellogg wrote in the’ Washington Times,’ we should be fighting to win the war, not to maneuver Iran into negotiations.
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said, “This strait will only be closed and opened under Iran’s command.” He added that Tehran would maintain the Strait’s closure blockade until the U.S. accepts what he characterized as the “reality of defeat.”
On Friday, Iran used drones to attack two UAE-flagged tankers. Iran has said that its missile and drone arsenals still contained about 75 percent of their capability. That seems unlikely given the hard U.S. and Israeli bombing attacks — and Mr. Trump’s claims that they have been mostly destroyed — but those capabilities can be rebuilt quickly by Chinese (and possibly Russian) shipments. The New York Times, eternally a harsh Trump critic and citing “classified intelligence,” wrote that the Iranian arsenal was at about seventy percent of its capacity.
Nevertheless, Iran’s missile and drone arsenal seems to be functioning as well as the ayatollahs require it to. Neither we or any of our “allies” are prepared to force the issue.
Three of those “allies” — Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan — as I have written elsewhere, are betting against the result of the Iran war by entering into a mutual defense pact. Pakistan, one of the supposed negotiators with Iran on our behalf is, with the other two nations, bringing three Sunni Islamic nations against Iran, a Shiite nation. All are frightened of Iran and, through their mutual defense treaty, are betting that the war will be ended not on American terms.
As I wrote last week, we are expending Patriot PAC-3MSE missiles far too fast as well as the Army’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system. The Pentagon is increasing purchases of both by almost ten times the amount that were purchased last year. That won’t solve the immediate problem because it takes a significantly long time to both expand production capabilities and obtain vital supplies to produce them.
We need to find cheaper, less complex, defensive systems both to defeat Iran and to counter Chinese aggression against Taiwan. Those will take years, at least, to produce. The Israelis have already produced laser weapons to down drones and missiles but our people have lagged behind the Israelis. The Israelis are helping us catch up.
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The issues of defeating Iran and reopening the Strait of Hormuz are of no interest to our supposed NATO allies. They, too, are suffering energy shortages (far more than we are) but to reopen the Strait is of no interest to them because they don’t want to fight Iran.
As this column has stated, the Strait of Hormuz should not be the focal point of the war against Iran. As Gen. Keith Kellogg wrote in the Washington Times, we should be fighting to win the war, not to maneuver Iran into negotiations.
Mr. Trump finally seems to realize that the Iranians won’t abide by any diplomatic deal. He has said that he is “losing faith” in the negotiations with Iran because they agree to one thing and then do another. It is that realization that should lead him to renew the bombing campaign.
War is a binary function: either you win or you lose. It’s as simple as that. By getting Iran to the negotiating table, we are not winning the war. We are losing.
America appears to have forgotten how to win wars. The Korean War began that trend, leading to an armistice but not a victory. We lost the Vietnam War. We mostly pulled out of Iraq and when we left Afghanistan we had our tail between our legs. Iran has to be different.
As this column has said, perhaps too often, the Tehran regime only understands military force applied relentlessly to achieve an objective that is within our goals. If we don’t apply that force with no end in sight, Iran won’t concede anything, especially its nuclear weapons program.
American military leaders, especially Joint Chiefs Chairman Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, need to come up with options to win the war with Iran and present them to the president. He may or may not go along with their advice but as soon as he realizes that we cannot win without going much further, Mr. Trump will either concede the war or travel the path to winning it.
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READ MORE from Jed Babbin:
The War With Iran Is Exposing America’s Missile Production Problem
Iran Is the Key to Trump’s Gaza Challenge
The Mamdani Warning
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