WSJ
On Iran Outcome, Nobody Knows Anything—Yet
The fog of war is especially thick when there’s no way to see inside the processes that really matter.
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TWITTERAssume a can opener. It’s a joke with its own Wikipedia page, one economists tell on economists, about being stuck on a deserted island with a can of food and no way open it.
Perhaps you guess where I’m headed. Unsatisfied with Donald Trump’s unstable Iran cease-fire are those who earlier imbibed his hope, unmet with means, of regime change. Also unsatisfied are those who approve of nothing he has done and yet are happy to rub in his face his TACO-like unwillingness to engage in further acts of which they would also disapprove.
Or maybe better to cite is the old Steve Martin gag about how you can be a millionaire and never pay taxes: “First, get a million dollars.”
Winner of the Kewpie doll is a Washington Post writer. First, get rid of all of Iran’s missiles. First, establish an impenetrable barrier around Iran’s nuclear sites and kill all who violate it. A writer in this newspaper at least recognizes the constraints on further Trump escalation but still insists the U.S. “must” dictate an ideal settlement without saying how. Many on one side see only the problems created by Mr. Trump in the past few weeks but not those spawned by 47 years of Iran’s so-called Islamic revolution. From every camp come hymns to the principle of free passage without saying how to uphold it in present circumstances.
Mr. Trump himself engages in wishful talk about a big beautiful deal, although I’m guessing he knows the real score and is managing his market and political risk while feeling for a path.
His remark threatening the end of Iran’s civilization was reprehensible, of course, but if you laughed you are probably on a righter track than those now locked in an orgasmatron of virtue signaling. (The time to worry is when Mr. Trump starts saying things that are conventionally sententious.)
His approach to Iran decidedly isn’t mine but neither is he likely to leave 530,000 or 140,000 U.S. troops stranded in another country’s civil war or, Truman-like, to draw a red line where he didn’t mean to and end up with 36,000 Americans dead.
Another favorite saying of economists: “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” Well, regime change might be a solution. But in the meantime, the Trump miscalculation wasn’t that Iran couldn’t block the Hormuz Strait, but that it wouldn’t. Would Mr. Trump have been wiser not to break the spell by which Iran threatened but refrained from acting? Maybe, but a Hormuz showdown may have been inevitable if Iran continued its nuclear pursuits. Does Mr. Trump’s war help or hurt Iran’s domestic reformers? Who knows?
The future is unknowable and so is the path untaken. But the logic of incentives is knowable. Those who insist Iran now rules the strait in perpetuity might explain why it didn’t then seize control long ago. The best case for Mr. Trump’s action remains: Iran’s missiles were becoming such a threat to the world’s oil supply that the next president would be unwilling to act against its nuclear program. Iran would own the strait anyway. The frequently drawn parallel is to North Korea’s conventional artillery massed in range of greater Seoul’s 26 million people. This huge conventional deterrence, the U.S. convinced itself, rendered impractical military action against the North’s nuclear program.
All the more timely, then, is a paper from George Washington University’s Nicholas D. Anderson and Dartmouth’s Daryl G. Press revisiting the North Korea assumption. Thanks to technology, the U.S. and South Korea have vastly improved their counterbattery capabilities, meaning they can take out North Korean guns as soon as they start firing. South Korea has massively invested in civil defense. Tens or hundreds of thousands of Seoul fatalities were once expected in a war. In a scenario where the U.S. and South Korea strike pre-emptively, the authors now predict 700 to 1,100.
Calculate for yourself whether the risk would be worth taking to eliminate a rogue state’s nuclear capacity. The larger lesson is that threats invoke countermeasures, and these change the incentives of those making the threats. Iran refrained from acting against the strait for decades because it knew that doing so would set in motion things it didn’t want. Those things are now in motion. To give the barest sketch, they include military countermeasures by its neighbors, infrastructure investments to bypass the Gulf, an emerging coalition of energy-consuming nations to liberate the strait, an increase in covert action funded by the U.S. and Arab petrostates against the regime, etc.
Then there are 93 million unhappy Iranian citizens. These are real things. This is a family newspaper but turn on a podcast or cable TV right now to experience full-frontal reification fallacy, a hyperventilation over words, whether those of Mr. Trump or the Iranians or the bullet points in their for-show peace proposals.
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Appeared in the April 11, 2026, print edition as 'On Iran Outcome, Nobody Knows Anything—Yet'.
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