Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has issued an ultimatum to Iran in the wake of the terrorists’ firing on one of our aircraft carriers and a guided-missile destroyer.

It’s simple: if Iran shoots at US ships, we will destroy (and sink) their oil tankers. All they have to do is not shoot at [the] US Navy[.]

That’s nice. Here’s a much better alternative, though. How about instead of, within Hegseth’s (and his boss, President Donald Trump’s (R)) preferred parameters of tit-for-tat, the Navy administered an extensive series of love taps on the sites from which attacks on our Navy might come, while simultaneously seizing the Iranian tankers, rather than destroying and sinking them?

The seized oil could be sold on at market prices, and the money used to help defray the cost of the Navy’s deployment into the Arabian Sea and Arabian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. The tankers themselves could be sold on (perhaps to US shippers to facilitate Jones Act shipping) or sent to American breakers to be sold for scrap, and the money from this used as prize money for the sailors involved.

Or continued misapprehension. In his article on time and the Hormuz Strait blockades, Yaroslav Trofimov had this remark, citing a senior Gulf Arab official. The official was talking about who had the more time to outlast the other’s blockade.

…the clock is ticking more for the Iranians because they are under enormous economic strain.

The underlying, and greater, question is this: which Iranians are under enormous economic strain? Certainly, the Iranian people are, with a currency that’s worthless outside of Iran, extremely high and rapidly rising inflation, limited and declining amounts of gasoline, limited and declining amounts of food, and on and on.

It’s just as certain, though, that the Iranians reigning over the country don’t care about any of that. They care only about their personal power, encouraging their satraps—Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis—to continue their terror attacks against Israel, and doing whatever they need to do to effect the destruction of Israel and sever damage to, if not destruction of, the US. These persons are feeling no economic strain whatsoever.

And this:

The country’s civilian leaders, such as President Masoud Pezeshkian and parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who led the June negotiations with the US, have called for a return to the talks, pointing to the deteriorating state of the Iranian economy.

That’s just empty rhetoric. Just as in those prior talks, and just as their predecessors did in prior years of talks, all these persons would do in any further talks is yap, delay, and stall. They will propose nothing serious.

The only way, the fastest way, also, to put a favorable end (for the world, not just for the US) to the current conflict is to conduct a full scale, persistent kinetic and cyber attack on Iran’s military facilities and military-supporting factories and on all of Iran’s nuclear weapons-related sites, and to kill those persons reigning over Iran, both civilian and IRGC.

If Iran’s persons in charge become ready for serious talks, their decision-makers can be given safe passage to the talks location while the attacks continue unabated.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been stepping up his drone invasions (they aren’t incursions; they’re deliberate and deliberatively provocative), sabotages, cyberattacks, election interferences, and on and on of Europe’s NATO member nations. The reason, Remigijus Bridikis, Lithuania’s State Security Department Director, says is this:

Russia is looking for ways to reduce support among NATO countries for Ukraine and, one of the secondary effects they are also pursuing is spreading panic[.]

The barbarian’s efforts to cow the Ukrainian people into submission with his terror bombing of houses, apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, shopping malls, and on and on is failing miserably. Those folks are too fresh from the Soviet jackboots on their necks to be intimidatable.  The populations of other nations are long gone soft and morally weak, he thinks, coddled as they’ve been, in fact, by American defenses and expenditures, so he’s starting to try those populations.

Putin isn’t far wrong regarding central and western Europe’s populations and government men and women. He’ll find the Baltic and Polish people, though, to be made of the same sterner stuff as Ukrainians and for the same reason.

The question becomes, then, how Germany, France, Spain, Italy, UK, Netherlands, Brussels, et al., will respond to Putin’s lower-key—journalists are pleased to call them “gray zone”—attacks. Those nations and their peoples have two paths along which to respond. One is to slowly back away and reduce support for Ukraine’s fight for its existence, hoping the barbarian at their gates will move on.

The other path is for them to have the moral courage and associated morale to step up their support for Ukraine and to do so materially, not just rhetorically.

That’s an open question, unfortunately.