“It’s getting to be decision time” on Iran, President Donald Trump said Sunday.
“Do I finish it off, which would be very easy to do, or do I make a deal?” he mused in a Fox News interview.
On Tuesday, at a get-out-the-vote rally in Lubbock, Texas, he put the choice on a clock.
“You’ll see Iran in a couple of weeks,” he said — the window that opens after Election Day, Nov. 3.
US and Israeli military planners have reportedly mapped out a short post-midterm campaign against Iran’s nuclear, missile and energy sites; some officials think three days of strikes could force concessions.
I spent eight years at the Treasury Department tightening sanctions on this regime — and I want it gone.
Which is why the next round of bombs should stay in the racks.
True, Iran is seeking to rebuild what Operation Epic Fury destroyed.
But another round of attacks would hand the regime the one thing that keeps it alive: a war.
The better answer is neither strike nor deal.
It’s to hold the pressure, point any force at the regime’s enforcers — and make them run a broke country with no war to hide behind.
The Islamic Republic is built to fight, not to govern; it survives when it is fighting.
In January, the regime answered protests over a collapsing rial with the deadliest crackdown in its history: Its Health Ministry reportedly put an internal count of the dead at more than 30,000 on Jan. 8 and 9 alone.
The war that the regime’s own conduct made unavoidable began on Feb. 28.
It lost its supreme leader that day and did not fall.
Since then it has imposed what Amnesty International calls the longest internet shutdown on record, 88 days; arrested more than 6,500 supposed “traitors and spies”; and carried out at least 39 political executions by late May.
The war emptied the streets of protesters — and let the regime finish what it had started.
But the pressure on it since is unprecedented.
Iran’s crude loadings fell from about 2 million barrels a day in March to 740,000 in July and none since September, according to industry tanker trackers.
The rial has lost a quarter of its value since late August and trades at about 2.7 million to the dollar; consumer prices were up 89.8% in September from a year earlier, per the Statistical Center of Iran.
The regime must still meet a payroll, subsidize fuel and keep the lights on — and it’s already failing.
According to Admiral Brad Cooper of US Central Command, Tehran is now “withholding salaries, pensions and benefits” from workers in oil, manufacturing and security, and from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps itself.
The shooters of January are going unpaid.
Trump’s deal-making option has been tried.
In June, the joint US-Iran memorandum promised to “terminate all types of sanctions” and envisioned a reconstruction fund of at least $300 billion; within days Treasury authorized Iranian oil sales, payable in dollars — relief Tehran never got under Barack Obama’s nuclear deal.
Three weeks later Tehran broke the cease-fire by attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
It had two bargaining chips, and both are going at once.
Strikes crippled the nuclear program. The blockade is burning through the other — time.
The regime has always been able to outlast any single US president, but its economy can’t outlast this one.
And “another little Epic Fury,” as Trump put it last week, would undo this.
Since the bombing paused, the regime has had the blockade’s pain without a war to run and no emergency to declare.
A blackout in wartime is a sacrifice the IRGC can police; in a cease-fire, it’s a failure the regime must explain.
Better to leave the regime to run the country it broke.
Hold the blockade and the sanctions; don’t trade them for a deal that restores Tehran’s oil income.
Strike only direct threats to Americans or allies.
Tell Iranians the US will stand with them when they return to the streets — and keep the ordinary people connected, via the satellite terminals the regime calls a “tool of war.”
If force is used again, aim it at the instruments the regime turns on its own people — the Basij militia, the state broadcaster that airs forced confessions — and not at the power plants.
The regime won’t accept Washington’s terms — no enrichment, the 60% uranium out of the country, a cap on its missiles — until it fears its own people more than American bombs.
Any deal it would sign before then is one it can live with.
Trump’s real choice is between a deal that squanders his leverage, and a chokehold the regime can’t survive.
Keep squeezing.
Miad Maleki, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, served as a Treasury Department sanctions official.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
