President Trump has reportedly briefed White House aides that he is willing to pull the US out of the war with Iran without ensuring that the Strait of Hormuz is reopened.
The vital maritime route through the Persian Gulf, which carries around 20 per cent of global oil supply in peacetime, has been effectively blockaded for weeks by Tehran’s attacks against commercial shipping, with oil prices rising from $73 per barrel before the war to between $90 and nearly $120 since it began.
But, citing a member of Trump’s “inner circle” the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that the president has concluded that “a mission to pry open the chokepoint would push the conflict beyond his timeline of four to six weeks”.
Instead, the report suggested that the president would withdraw the US from the war once “its main goals of hobbling Iran’s navy and its missile stocks” had been achieved, even if the strait remains closed.
But Suzanne Maloney, Vice President of the Brookings Institution in Washington, told the paper that such a move would be “unbelievably irresponsible”.
"Energy markets are inherently global, and there is no possibility of insulating the US from the economic damage that is already occurring and will become exponentially worse if the closure of the strait continues,” she said.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Netanyahu has suggested that Israel’s campaign against Iran is “beyond its halfway point”, though he later clarified that he meant “in terms of missions, not necessarily in terms of time".
In an interview with US outlet Newsmax on Monday, he also predicted that the Islamic regime in Tehran would “collapse internally” under sustained pressure from the US and Israel and claimed that Operation Roaring Lion has eliminated “thousands” of officials in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), adding that it was “close to finishing [Iran’s] arms industry”.
But Channel 12’s Amit Segal reported last week that Jerusalem “has given up on the dream of toppling the regime through air power”.
"Israel has become convinced that Trump may try to end the war soon, and therefore shifted most of its airstrikes from targeting the destabilisation of the Iranian regime to inflicting severe damage on its military,” he went on.
Likewise, former JC Editor Jake Wallis Simons reports: “Regime change in Iran is now off the table, as the opposition is not organised and is successfully repressed, sources tell me.
"Israeli targeting is therefore shifting from regime repression apparatus to its military capabilities. Looks like this thing will end with a deal after all.
“One Israeli source says: ‘I believe we are in a better place, but it’s not a win.’”
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