No. of Recommendations: 10
Then we should just lay down our arms now and walk away. Because they hold all the cards and there's zero point.
I don't think we can do that now. For all the President's bluster that we've already won, we might have to sit down and actually negotiate out an end to the war. I mean, we could always just leave - we're not literally trapped there. But we're likely better off with the war ending in a negotiated agreement than our just abruptly departing and leaving everything....well, just broken. The Administration detests the "Pottery Barn" rule, but the region has been badly damaged by the war, and our allies are likely going to need some "clean up on aisle 6," as it were.
We should be able to extract some concessions out of Iran to end the war. I don't know whether we can get as good as we could have gotten before the war, or as good as the JCPOA - and we certainly won't get anything that's worth the resources we expended to get here - but we should be able to get some framework in place in exchange for concluding hostilities. But we're probably better off getting to that agreement now, rather than resuming the bombing and trying to outlast Iran in a war of attrition. Because while we can hurt them a lot by doing that, we also suffer a lot of damage ourselves, and it's hard to see that it would materially change where we end up.
