🇮🇷🇺🇸 Nearly 6 months into this war, and the mission has quietly shifted from stopping a nuclear program to reopening a stretch of water that was free before it started.
Aaron David Miller, former State Department Middle East negotiator, joined me after Iran's largest strike on the Gulf since the ceasefire.
He says the questions everyone kept asking are answered now. Would Iran close the Strait again to get what it wants? It just did. Would Trump walk away from a fight that isn't existential for the U.S.? Not a chance, in his view, because for this president the calculation isn't strategic.
"What matters to Donald Trump? Money, power and glory."
Miller's read: conceding the Strait means admitting "Operation Epic Fury" turned into a defeat, on the same order as Putin failing to break Ukraine after 5 years.
Centrifuges may be spinning again at undeclared sites, missile silos are being repaired, and there's no secretary of state running point on the diplomacy, just a patchwork of side deals in Lebanon and Switzerland that contradict each other.
His bigger worry isn't the current strikes. It's the escalatory ladder underneath them: deeper U.S. strikes on civilian infrastructure, an Iranian response, and eventually an inspired attack on American soil that nobody ordered and nobody can walk back.
Average interstate wars run 4 to 5 months. This one's closing in on 6 with no negotiating structure left standing.
Does that timeline tell you this ends soon, or that it's already becoming the region's new normal?
@aarondmiller2
