Today, Les, John, and special guest Richard Goldberg assess where the Iran conflict stands and where it is headed. The Strait of Hormuz is once again a flashpoint, with U.S. naval forces blockading traffic while escorting commercial shipping — a posture that has helped push down gas prices but left Tehran cut off from economic relief. Iran's missile manufacturing capacity has taken serious damage, its proxies are diminished, and the regional coalition willing to push back against Tehran is growing.
Can the United States sustain a low-level kinetic pressure campaign without either failing to keep the Strait sufficiently open or pushing Iran into a corner that forces escalation? Is Washington executing a deliberate anaconda strategy, or risk managing its way into an open-ended conflict with no defined endgame? With the Iranian economy in freefall and the regime's popular legitimacy threadbare, are U.S. operations actually forestalling the one card that could matter most — an uprising by the Iranian people themselves?
Check out the answers to these questions and more in this episode of Fault Lines.
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