🇮🇷🇺🇸 Venezuela flipped, Assad fell, Hezbollah lost its leadership. One theory of this war: that winning streak is exactly what talked Washington into Iran...
Joshua Landis has studied the region for decades, and his account of how we got here starts with success.
Watching enemy after enemy get squeezed into submission, sanctions grinding Syria until its new government came asking for relief, a president could believe Iran was simply the last low-hanging fruit.
The scale problem: Iraq was 24 million people. Libya seven. Iran is a well-educated, oil-rich nation of NINETY million, and in his phrase, we're choking on it.
His read of Tehran's strait grab is deterrence, not revenue.
Iran watched Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria get mowed like lawns and concluded that only a hand on the world's oil valve stops the mower from returning.
The MOU proved the strategy works once; they won't unlearn it.
His darker warning was about decapitation itself: kill the top layer and the second rung competes to out-hardline each other, making every decision harder to read and every off-ramp harder to take.
Mid-conversation, the bombs underlined him, Sirik, Bandar Abbas, sirens in Bahrain, and Iran's deputy foreign minister declared the MOU "completely dismantled."
Neither side, Landis noted, is anywhere near collapse.
We are at the beginning.
@joshua_landis
