President Donald Trump had no sooner declared the Iran war “terminated” in a Friday letter to Congress than fighting broke out afresh. On Monday, Iranian forces chose to attack the merchant ships, the U.S. Navy, and other peaceful neighbors, and the U.S. sank six small Iranian attack boats in response. The Trump administration would rather not let such skirmishes derail the fragile ceasefire, but the Iranian regime still appears unwilling to play ball.
Two days after President Trump told Congress that hostilities with the Iranian regime were “terminated,” he announced a new operation, Project Freedom, whereby the U.S. military would create a safe corridor for civilian ships to leave the Persian Gulf. On Monday, U.S. destroyers escorted two U.S.-flagged tankers through the Strait, near the Omani shore, demonstrating that the U.S. military had cleared a “free lane” of Iranian mines. U.S. Central Command then advised commercial vessels to use the lane, while American naval vessels and military aircraft in the Strait provided a defensive shield.
For the Iranian regime, whose only remaining leverage in negotiations are the oil tankers trapped in the Persian Gulf, allowing America’s gambit to succeed would be effectively a final defeat. The “ceasefire” that President Trump unilaterally declared on April 7 largely consisted of the U.S. keeping its assets out of the Iranian regime’s diminished reach. But here was the U.S. Navy traipsing across Iran’s own backyard, practically daring Iran to attack. The remnants of the ruined regime reasoned they might never receive a better opportunity.
So, Iran attacked. They launched cruise missiles at American destroyers, and they launched drones on an empty Emirati tanker and a South Korean vessel trying to flee. They launched a squadron of fast attack boats — whether to lay mines, attack vessels, or capture them is unclear. And, for good measure, the Iranian regime also launched some 15 missiles and drones at its peaceful neighbor, the UAE, striking the Fujairah Oil Industry Zone on a UAE pipeline that bypasses the Strait.
Iran’s best available opportunity was still not a good one. The attack only demonstrated the regime’s impotence. The U.S. Navy intercepted the incoming missiles, and Apache helicopters sank the speedboats. Iran did manage to damage the civilian vessels and civilian targets in the UAE, but striking defenseless civilian targets is not really an impressive feat.
Iran’s pitiful provocations may elicit escalation in one form or another. President Trump declared that Iranian ships that attacked U.S. vessels would be “blown off the face of the earth,” and the furious Emiratis will insist that attacks against them must be answered. “The Iranians have fired the first shots to end the cease-fire,” observed The Wall Street Journal editors, “which is all the reason Mr. Trump needs to use the force to stop them from getting away with it again.”
However, the Trump administration has not publicly declared that Iran is in violation of the agreement. On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the ceasefire “certainly holds” for now. What value there is in a “ceasefire” where both parties have resumed firing is a matter for debate.
The Trump administration’s reason for sticking to the ceasefire has nothing to do with the Iranian regime and everything to do with its domestic political situation. Finding Congress unwilling to support a campaign to finish the job, the Trump administration decided instead to tell Congress that the war was already over — whether Congress believes it or not.
“The greatest enemy is our own political dynamics,” lamented Michael Rubin, director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum, on “Washington Watch.” “The Iranians know that the Iranians have lost by any metric. It’s quite amazing how many people think that the United States has been stalemated.”
“In this case, the Iranians have lost a top three or four layers of their leadership,” he explained. “They’ve lost most of their military equipment, they’ve lost their economy, and so forth. We are in a position to dictate to them. We shouldn’t go into a game of poker having a full house or a royal flush and be out-bluffed by a pair of twos.”
“Historically, the American people have a short temperament for these types of things,” agreed Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “You get a new administration, and they’ll completely reverse course.”
The Iranian regime is likely counting on just that. “Their usual playbook … is simply to run down the clock in the hope that the people with whom they’re negotiating will eventually move on,” Rubin responded. “Because, of course, while Iran is a dictatorship, we’re a democracy. And therefore, what they’re doing is fishing for a future official who might rescue them from the mess which the Iranians now find themselves in.”
Of course, such a claim requires a definition of the Iranian regime — some understanding of who is actually running the country. Over the past month, the Iranian regime has maintained a defiant military posture, even with “certain conversations taking place, but the actions are not meshing with the conversations,” Perkins described. To him, this suggested that “the Islamic Revolutionary Guard is actually driving the train.”
“That is precisely correct,” assented former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on “This Week on Capitol Hill.” “I would add, I think that’s largely been true for 47 years. I think it has been the hardest of the hardcore that’s been driving this, with a theocratic veneer that’s now been shed because of the ayatollah’s demise.”
When dealing with the Iranian regime, said the man who actually did so, it’s important to remember that “there aren’t any ‘moderates’ … in the sense that we would understand people who don’t want to destroy the nation of Israel, who aren’t trying to create a caliphate. They believe all the same things that the radicals do. Their methodologies, their timing may be different, but there is not a leader inside of Iran that doesn’t believe that the Islamic Republic of Iran is entitled to rule the Middle East, and that Israel has no place in the region.”
“The IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] is a powerful, capable military,” but “we’ve taken out much of that,” Pompeo described. However, in addition, IRGC operatives “are important politically — that is, they have the guns inside. They have capacity to control the populace. But they’re also an economic juggernaut. They own as much as one-fifth or one-third of the Iranian economy.”
“I happen to agree with Secretary Pompeo on this,” Rubin confirmed. “When some people have said that Donald Trump’s actions have only radicalized the regime, I don’t think they’re actually seeing the big picture. Iran, of course, is a conscript society. And therefore, you either were conscripted into the army or you had to join the Revolutionary Guard. … And as soon as the bombs started dropping, these guys who weren’t true believers simply faded into the woodwork. What remained were the true believers.”
Rubin also explained how the IRGC cultivates such “true believers” in its failing ideology. “You can go into that bubble when you’re eight years old, because they run the equivalent of evil Boy Scout programs,” he said. “Then they have student clubs. They run their own universities. And so, if you’ve been indoctrinated since the age of eight, you may actually believe what may sound like nonsense to us, which so many previous administrations in Washington were willing to dismiss as rhetorical flourish. They’re not rhetorical flourish.”
The ideological commitment of those driving Iranian policy is one reason why the Islamic regime has so stubbornly refused to negotiate a surrender of its fissile material — even after its military was all but destroyed. In its latest 14-point peace proposal, “almost each of those 14 points” was “so ridiculous on the face that really what the Iranians are trying to do is signal to the United States they’re not interested in negotiating,” said Rubin. “Ideologically, they will never accept a solution.”
Iran’s ideological inflexibility is a “conundrum that President Trump and, frankly, every president before him” has faced, said Pompeo. Rubin agreed, “The United States is very bad, traditionally, at understanding the ideology of its adversaries. And Donald Trump … is a fabulous negotiator … from this milieu of real estate dealing and so forth. But … you can’t be transactional with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”
This belated realization prompted Trump to blockade Iran’s ports, deciding that the only way to break the IRGC’s hold on power was to box in the economic engine they control. “President Trump is on the right track,” cheered Pompeo. “The blockage of the Strait of Hormuz is certainly impacting their revenue, their ability to pay their soldiers, their proxy forces.”
“The Iranians have never been in such poor economic straits,” reiterated Rubin. “The Iranian currency is now 1.8 million to the dollar. At the time of the revolution, it was 70 to the dollar. It’s in freefall. They can’t export their oil. They can’t import their gasoline. And remember, the Persian Gulf might be huge, but there’s only about 10 Iranian ports there that we need to control. And, right now, we’re controlling them.”
“If we’re going to negotiate, we negotiate from a position of strength,” Rubin urged. The blockade achieves that, and reopening the Strait of Hormuz strips away the last bit of leverage the Iranian regime has. Neither measure, however, is strictly peaceful. Even still, Pompeo said, “There is no negotiated solution that actually gets to a place where the regime will acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, that the United States should exist, and that the Iranian regime should not be in possession of a nuclear weapons capability.”
Pompeo and Rubin both agreed that weakening the IRGC also opened a pathway for internal revolt — though a slim one. “There’s an analogy with regard to Serbia,” Rubin proposed, “where, when Bill Clinton bombed Serbia, he didn’t unseat Slobodan Milosevic. That happened the next year because Slobodan Milosevic wasn’t able to pay the salaries, and a lot of his allies had simply been killed in this bombing.”
However, “the difference between Slobodan Milosevic and the Iranian leadership is that Slobodan Milosevic and his Serbian nationalists weren’t willing to wholesale slaughter everyone in their country,” Rubin cautioned. “It appears that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are. And, even if the Iranians among them aren’t, they’re importing Hezbollah and Iraqi militias to do the same thing.”
An internal uprising “is possible,” said Pompeo. “I don’t think that’s the most likely outcome, but it’s the one that we should support and pray and root for.”
Rather, the aim of the American blockade is to so weaken Iran that the IRGC is forced to agree to a deal which is effectively a surrender, Pompeo suggested. “I think that’s how this ultimately ends up being resolved. And that means more time, a little bit more patience by the American people — some more cost to the American consumers, for sure. But this is a resolve that I think is really important for Western civilization to achieve.”
However, he warned that such a “surrender” would not represent a change in heart or ideology, only a temporary surrender to circumstances. “So long as the regime is in power, they may pause for two years or five years or 10, but their determination will remain,” he said. “And so, from a Western perspective, the objective is to wipe out their capability materially. Get a verification regime around their nuclear program so that there’s no enrichment, no capacity to actually ever threaten the world again with a nuclear weapon. And then, be mindful.”
There is no permanent peace with the radical Islamic regime that rules Iran, only ceasefires of more or less value, lasting for shorter or longer periods of time.
AUTHOR
Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.
EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.
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