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The Walk Away option: The President can avoid another round of diplomatic frustrations and dangerous escalation by simply declaring victory and walking away. President Trump has already laid the groundwork for this scenario; each time he’s discussed the war and listed off the number of Iranian capabilities we’ve destroyed, he’s messaging a win. Per his own statements, the war ends when Trump says it’s over. Now is the perfect time for him to say it’s over. By pulling our blockade from the Gulf & our troops out of our remaining bases in the region, we end the conflict kinetically while simultaneously (finally) depriving Iran a key point of leverage: actionable military targets to strike. We essentially force Iran to reopen the SOH because they can no longer reasonably justify attacking ships without an active aggressor to blame. The Iranians have demonstrated that they care deeply about public opinion—therefore, once we lift the blockade, they’re likely to engage in serious talks with the Gulf states to come up with an arrangement that quickly opens the SOH. We then use economic leverage to our advantage: we offer incremental sanctions relief on Iranian oil to make opening SOH a non-negotiable for the Iranians. While President Trump takes a victory lap about having ended the war & ensuring that Iran won’t have a nuclear weapon, our diplomats can quietly work with our Gulf allies and the Iranians to negotiate a workable peace plan that ensures the SOH stays open. Right now Iranian leaders are unable to make many concessions with the U.S. threatening another round of strikes. The Iranian people rallied around the hardliners in their government after we killed the former supreme leader & members of his family including children, and the tragic bombing of a girl’s school. If you understand basic human nature, you’ll understand why all of this has had a radicalizing effect on their population. Now, many Iranians believe that the only acceptable path forward, for the sake of their national pride and to deter future attacks, is by forcing a badly blooded U.S. retreat from the region. Our walking away from the conflict will provide Iranian leadership a symbolic victory they can tout to their now-galvanized people, allowing more latitude for them to eventually reach a compromise with us on bigger items, like the nuclear issue. By walking away, we buy more trade space for compromise in future negotiations that won’t be possible if we remain poised to strike Iran. At the moment, Trump has the political power in the U.S. to sell walking away as a victory to his base. Of course, the same neocons who talked him into this war will complain and attack him, but they don’t represent a legitimate constituency. This war is widely unpopular—ending it will be widely popular. In the long run, history will commend Trump for choosing this option. In recognizing that the war was a mistake, and by leaving quickly before getting bogged down in a quagmire, he avoids falling into the gambler’s fallacy that ensnared many of his predecessors and got thousands of Americans killed.

There is no such thing as a short, 3-4 day military operation—if we strike Iran, they will respond. We have consistently underestimated the most basic reality: the enemy gets a vote. There is no military option that will persuade Iran to accept the U.S.’s terms for a deal—after 8 months of failing to restore order to the chaos it caused, the administration knows this— so what is the purpose of more strikes? If we strike Iran by targeting more of their leaders and/or energy infrastructure, Iran will retaliate by striking Gulf energy infrastructure & U.S. forces in the region. More American troops will needlessly die, & our energy prices will continue to skyrocket. Iran’s allies & proxies—like the Houthis, Iraqi militias, & possibly Bahraini groups—will attack Saudi energy infrastructure, the BAM/Suez, & will potentially attack the governments of Kuwait & Bahrain. We’re already unable to help the Saudis deter the Houthis—if we engage in kinetic combat against Iran, we’ll be even more incapable of assisting our already-weakened allies. More strikes won’t change the game. Walking away & declaring victory before Tuesday sets a positive tone for the elections & resets the parameters for negotiations with Iran. President Trump can avoid the escalation trap by walking away now, before the fog of war envelops the rest of his presidency.