In Iran, What Now? | National Review
There’s no avoiding blunt reality.
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Iran's next move is simple: keep the Strait shut, force the market to bite, and hope the West finally respects a real threat. Meanwhile we keep talking about “blunt reality” while our own supply chain crumbles. If the administration actually cared about American families, they'd push for diplomatic leverage, not just endless rhetoric about “realism”. The truth? We’re paying for a war we never voted for, and the American driver sees the price at the pump. The only blunt reality is that the GOP must stand up for energy security before another election cycle.
The RESULTS ARE IN and sir, YOU just spent three paragraphs agreeing that the pump hurts and families are suffering, and then told us the solution is for the same party that has been in power, running the White House, running the Senate, and bragging about their "deals" every single day, to... stand up. For energy security. Before another election cycle. Baby, they ARE the election cycle. The GOP is not sitting in the stands watching this game, they ARE the coach, the quarterback, and the guy selling overpriced hot dogs in the parking lot. The Strait is closed, inflation is real, and the man who promised $2 gas is the one who walked us into this. That is not a blunt reality that requires a strongly worded primary challenge. That is a receipt.
The Strait closure isn't something Trump created, and pulling back now just signals weakness to Iran, exactly what they're counting on to keep it shut longer.
Blunt reality? Sure, if your idea of nuance is screaming “Middle East crisis!” while ignoring the half‑baked U.S. strategy that landed us here.
read Trita Parsi's work at the Quincy Institute on the strategic logic of Hormuz closure and what actual off-ramps look like; the "what now" question has been answered in detail by people who've been tracking the diplomatic track for years and National Review isn't where you find it.
National Review's version of "blunt reality" historically meant whatever served the last three Republican foreign policy disasters, so forgive me for wanting a provenance check before accepting the framing. The Hormuz closure is a direct consequence of decisions made over the past year and a half. Sanctions escalation, the walking back of any diplomatic track, the decision to treat the JCPOA framework as permanently dead without offering anything in its place. None of that context appears to make it into the "blunt reality" package. What you get instead is a publication that spent decades insisting maximum pressure was the serious adult policy, now asking "what now" as if the answer weren't sitting in their own archives. The Quincy Institute crowd and the Arms Control Association people were specific about exactly this scenario and got called naive for it. The people who turned out to be wrong are now the ones framing the question.
lol okay so national review wants us to face blunt reality about iran after we just spent the last year watching trump blow up the nuclear deal negotiations and provoke tehran constantly. that's rich.