I know. I'm frustrated, too.
Last weekend, it was all I could do to resist pulling up X on my cellphone while watching the Tesdeschi Trucks Band absolutely rock the world-famous Red Rocks venue in Morrison, Colorado last Friday and Saturday night. It seemed like the knockout blow to the Iranian rump regime's remnants and infrastructure was imminent and I was afraid I'd miss the fireworks.
When I got back to the hotel and learned that at the request of Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, President Donald Trump had yet again called off the big strike in search of a quick deal, I wanted to throw my phone out the window.
Here we are a week later, and there's still no deal. No surrender by the IRGC-led regime in Tehran, nothing other than rhetorical bluster that the Iranian toll booth in the Strait of Hormuz is going to be gold-plated by this time next year.
Hawks on what to do with Iran, like me, are disappointed at no resumption in meaningful kinetic action, strikes sensitive enough to not only remove their capacity to fight back, but their will as well. Doves on Iran see a glimmer of hope that the junta may finally have defeated the powerful American military by sheer will of defiance. Trump haters simply looked at events in the last week as ineptness and incompetence.
What to make of the state of the Strait? My column a couple weeks ago said that Iran was on a path to ultimate extinction. I stand by it, and nothing this week has led me to believe any different outcome is probable, even though the promised grand finale series of strikes I believe would hasten the regime's collapse has been delayed for now.
In the Oval Office yesterday in front of a gaggle of reporters present to watch him sign an executive order ending birth tourism, a question got asked about the potential for a deal with Iran. President Trump had this to say.
"I don't think they can go much longer," he said, based on what he's seen. I know what I've seen in the open source world of late, and that assessment squares with what I read, and I'm sure the President gets intelligence far greater than what is publicly available.
Let's take a look at life currently in Iran. Miad Maleki is a former United States Treasury official, Air Force veteran, and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who follows the Iranian economy like very few others.
A pause in strikes buys the Iranian regime time, not relief. The regime's most crippling reckoning isn't with the U.S. or Israel but it's with its own people. Barely 35% of working-age Iranians actually have a job and the current minimum wage covers barely a quarter of actual living costs.
Iranians know their country's true economic potential and know they deserve better, the Islamic Republic's revolutionary ideology is dead, even among the regime's own children.
The regime can evade external accountability, but the most punishing thing to the regime right now is to force them to go back to face domestic accountability, an economy that, when not retrained by a state of war, will show its underlying disastrous inflation, unemployment, corrupt trade, war damages, and crippled political institutions.
Iran has never been so diplomatically isolated, its share of global trade has collapsed from 2.2% to below 0.02%. That isolation will keep showing up in Iran's economy as businesses, even in friendly countries, refuse to risk trade and investment there given sanctions exposure and war risk.
https://hotair.com/generalissimo/2026/08/07/oil-isnt-the-only-commodity-not-flowing-in-iran-n3817750
