Joanne Maria Pini

No. Pape is right on the money. > “Iran cannot "control" the Strait of Hormuz outside of the conditions of war” Ofc, it can. No power on earth can remove the Hormuz weapon from its hands as long as Iran has not been disarmed. Iran cannot be disarmed short of a major ground war, and even that would be temporary. > Iran “cannot tolerate an attritional war forever.” The same is true of the United States and Israel. No one can fight forever. The relevant issue is who can stay in the fight longer. Time is Iran’s great power ally because Iran is vastly more resolved and willing to bear costs than the US. > “The ability to project a threat is not the same thing as control. Every country in the region has the same basic military capability as Iran to disrupt maritime shipping. It is not hard to fire a missile at a ship.” No. The issue is not whether you can fire drone. It is whether you can do that when the US is trying to gut you. No other state in the region is capable of this. > “The best leverage Iran has to achieve a ceasefire is the promise of "opening" the strait. By definition this means that if a ceasefire takes hold, Iran will have forgone control.” Absolutely not. As @gideonrachman correctly points out, the Hormuz weapon is not going anywhere even if the toll booth is not imposed. There is, in fact, no getting rid of it short of destroying Iran. > “It may be able to use the threat of renewed attacks on the strait to deter further military aggression, but it will not be able to change the status of the strait or decide who gets to use it. This is because Iran can only credibly threaten vessels *while a war is ongoing*.” This is not how the world works. The Hormuz weapon is extremely versatile; it can be used surgically in peacetime to coerce both the gulf state, faraway states that are especially reliant on gulf energy. It’s far, far more useful than a nuclear weapon. > “Even if by some measure Iran retains "control" of the strait, the country's hard power, which is derivative of its industrial base and mobilization capacity, will necessarily be diminished.” Attrition is hardly one-sided. US and Israeli forces are also getting attrited. Even if the US had won in the first 72 hours, it would’ve come away with some losses. Would we have said than the US was weaker? This is not how this works. > “Iran will not emerge from the war as a superpower” Ofc not. It will emerge as a great power. I prefer this usage to Pape’s because it has a much longer intellectual history behind it; we know exactly what proof we need for that. Pape prefers world power, but that suggests a power projection capability that Iran does not have. He also calls Iran an oil hegemon, which is more correct. But great power is the most appropriate term to describe the rise of this new power after the defeat of the United States. > “any arguments suggesting that further U.S. military action is needed to forestall that outcome are detached from reality.” This reminds me of the argument that @nikhil_palsingh made against the @ProfessorPape article. That suggestion is the result of the haggling with the nytimes editor. If you read Pape and listen to his arguments on his biweekly video conferences, it becomes very clear that he thinks that the ground invasion option is a trap and will lead to a vaster bigger catastrophe for the US and the world economy. The division math makes it very clear that a land war will be extraordinarily costly and cannot possibly work except in a very temporary sense. x.com/policytensor/s…