When you can’t open a door, board it up and call it strategy
Add the probabilities up and you notice something. The scenario USrael planned for - the one where Iran folds in 13 days and everyone goes home - sits at about 5%. The scenarios they didn’t plan for, or chose not to think about, or assumed wouldn’t happen because the spreadsheet said 13 days, make up the other 95%.
And the single most likely outcome, the forever war at 30%, is one that primarily benefits a man whose corruption trial cannot resume while the war continues.
I keep coming back to that. The architecture of this conflict increasingly looks like it was not designed to be won. It was designed to not end.
The blockade is not genius. Genius would have been not starting this war in the first place, when the strait was open and oil was $70.
But it’s not pure desperation either. It is something more familiar.
It’s the thing America does when it has exhausted every option except the one that requires admitting the original plan failed.
Go big - and not go home.
So you blockade the blockade, and you pray to the spreadsheet god.