The Tantric War

You’ve heard of the Punic Wars. Purely from the point of view of messaging, one is tempted to call the ongoing conflict with Iran the Tantric War. From “a whole civilization will die tonight” in April to “economic D-Day” this week, strategic climaxes are promised, but ever deferred. Scott Bessent’s depiction on Monday of Operation Economic Outcast, the new campaign targeting Iran, suggested something more targeted, intelligence-driven, and discreet than the president’s beach-storming imagery had teased us to believe. That’s not to say that the briefing or the campaign lack substance. If “secondary sanctions” (sanctions on third parties doing business with Iran) are aggressively implemented, the new Bessent approach to the war could cause the regime in Iran great distress. But economic warfare takes time, and this new campaign will have to contend with a problematic asymmetry. For Iran to succeed, it needs to generate enough economic and political pressure in the United States for President Trump to decide he’s better off without this conflict. (Indeed, the weak June MOU shows that Iran could have walked away with this outcome but for its insistence on controlling the Strait of Hormuz and thus humiliating Trump.) But for America to succeed, we must directly endanger the power position of the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) clique now controlling Iran, forcing them to negotiate or risk being displaced by others. Regime change from the sky was not so successful in March and April. Now we will try, in effect, regime change at the bank. Bessent’s remarks were implicitly clear-eyed about what success would need to look like, and he asserted that the intelligence efforts had “mapped every node, every facilitator, and every network that Iran has used to smuggle oil and evade sanctions.” His remarks were accompanied by announcements from the Treasury Department and the State Department of a raft of specific sanctions targeting Iranian officials and facilitators for Iranian weapons procurement, malicious cyber activities, energy and petrochemical smuggling, and other categories of misbehavior.