Day 68. Trump launched a naval escort mission, ‘Project Freedom,’ to force open the Strait of Hormuz. Iran attacked the ships. The U.S. sank seven Iranian patrol boats. Then Trump paused the operation, citing “great progress” toward a complete and final agreement with Iran, while keeping the naval blockade of Iranian ports locked in. Secretary of State Rubio stood at the White House briefing room podium on May 5 and said Operation Epic Fury is “over.” A one-page framework is reportedly moving through Pakistani mediators. Iran’s foreign minister flew to Beijing. The mullahs, by any honest read, are running out of road. That is maximum pressure, not as a post-war talking point, but as a live operating condition.
I’ve watched a lot of these standoffs play out, and I have personal skin in this one. My son is a West Point graduate who flies Army helicopters. My brother is a retired Green Beret who spent a career in the places this country doesn’t put on press releases. In my brief time in the Marines they taught one lesson above all others: never let the enemy set the tempo. Trump has not. From the opening strikes on February 28 straight through to today’s blockade, Washington has held the initiative. That is not an accident.
Here is the sequence the therapy-couch foreign policy crowd would prefer to skip. On February 28, U.S. and Israeli forces launched coordinated strikes that dismantled Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, missile stockpiles, and air defenses in a matter of days — and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the opening salvo. Forty days of follow-on operations brought Tehran to the table. The Pakistan-brokered ceasefire took effect April 7, with 13 U.S. service members killed and several hundred wounded, a real and painful price, but far below what a nuclear-armed Iran would have eventually cost. The mission ran on clear objectives and overwhelming force. No occupation. No nation-building. No exit-strategy theater.
The ripple effects are real, and I won’t paper over them. Gas hit $4.39 per gallon on May 1, up roughly 50% since February 28. The Strait of Hormuz remains a dual-blockade standoff: the U.S. Navy blockades Iranian ports, Iran blockades the Gulf. More than 1,500 vessels and 22,500 mariners are trapped inside. At least 10 sailors have already died due to Iran’s blockade of the waterway. None of that is costless, and any column that pretends otherwise is selling something. What I’m offering instead is the comparison that matters: these are the costs of ending a slow-motion Iranian war of attrition versus the costs of letting one continue, on Tehran’s terms, with a nuclear bomb at the end of it.
The squeeze is working, and Iran knows it. Iran’s economy was already under severe stress before the first bomb fell — inflation above 40% in 2025, a collapsing rial, sanctions-shrunken oil revenues. The naval blockade has now cut off the cash flow Iran needs to hold its government together. Iran’s lead negotiator told the world this week that the situation in the strait is “unbearable” for America, while quietly running his foreign minister to Beijing and passing proposals through Pakistani go-betweens. People who have leverage do not courier messages to caves. They return calls.
One thread runs through every Iranian proposal and must not break: the nuclear question. Tehran’s last formal offer tried to defer enrichment talks to a later, unspecified stage — a 15-year freeze floated as a sweetener, with the real fight kicked down the road. Iran is sitting on 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% purity, one technical step from weapons grade, with zero peaceful application. Trump said the offer was “not acceptable.” Rubio backed him up. Whatever framework emerges from the current Pakistani backchannel must resolve enrichment completely, not park it for a future administration to inherit. A deal that reopens the Strait without defanging the program is a defeat wearing a ribbon.
Compare this to the Obama-Biden-Harris approach: twelve years of sanctions relief that fed directly into Iranian missile programs, a public posture that broadcast weakness from day one, delivering pallets of cash, and a nuclear deal that Iran was already violating before the ink dried. Tehran enriched uranium to near-weapons grade, bankrolled every proxy in the region, and attacked U.S. bases and shipping while Washington debated proportionality. We also got an unfiltered read on our alliances. NATO partners who had grown comfortable under the American security umbrella suddenly remembered what deterrence actually costs to maintain. Ronald Reagan knew this arithmetic cold: you do not negotiate with theocracies from a crouch. Trump didn’t, and the results speak.
Jocko Willink calls it “default aggressive.” The foreign-policy establishment called it reckless, right up until it produced a ceasefire that twelve years of diplomacy could not manufacture. American operators and their Israeli partners dismantled a generational threat with surgical efficiency, without an occupation, without a reconstruction bill that would have run to the trillions, and without the endless rotation of forces into a theater designed to grind us down. Clear objectives, executed without apology. Every adversary watching from Beijing to Moscow filed that lesson away.
There will always be someone who argues that kinetic action risks a broader war. Fair, if you pretend the pre-war status quo, was peace. It was not. Iranian-backed militias killed Americans in Iraq and Syria. Houthi strikes were strangling Red Sea commerce. Iran’s centrifuges were spinning toward breakout. Calling that arrangement stable was not restraint. It was a choice to let someone else set the terms of the eventual confrontation, at a time of their choosing, with a nuclear card in hand. Trump took the option away.
My wealth management clients grasp this without a briefing. You don’t protect capital by signaling you’ll absorb losses. You set terms by making the downside too expensive for any counterparty to probe. Nations run on the same logic.
The deal, if it comes, must hold every red line: no enrichment, full removal of the existing stockpile, verification with teeth, the Strait open and free. Anything less is pressure relief for Tehran on the installment plan. Sustained sanctions must be tied to performance, not promises. Maximizing domestic energy production aims to prevent any future president from being vulnerable to a chokepoint controlled by Iran. And a standing posture that makes clear the blockade does not lift until the terms are met. Trump on Wednesday put it plainly: if Iran walks away, “the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before.” That is the only language that produced this moment. Don’t put it away.
That which does not kill us makes us stronger, unless you are a mullah who spent forty-seven years counting on American patience running out before your own. It hasn’t. Not this time.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
