Subject: Re: Is NATO figuring it out?
Doing nothing is a choice. Strategic inaction has consequences.

True. That doesn't mean that doing any particular action is smart. Or will make things better. Or won't make things worse.

That they didn't - when they had the law and moral authority on their side - is a simultaneous demonstration of moral weakness, cowardice and the lack of any ability to project power.

Why didn't we do that? Why haven't we started escorting tankers and other shipping vessels through the gulf? Is it because of our moral weakness, cowardice, and lack of any ability to project power?

Or is because that particular mission involves putting servicemen and women within twenty miles of the Iranian coast, making them viable targets for Iran to create non-trivial numbers of casualties that the American public will not support?

LOL. They were headed down the path of getting a nuclear weapon. Several of them, in fact.

And all of those paths remain just as open to them now as they did before the war. We haven't done anything to change their capabilities.

Iranian strategy has always been to head down the path of getting a nuclear weapon and not pass breakout. If they had actually wanted to move to breakout, they easily could have at any point during the last five or six years (up until the 12 Day War). But they did not. Because the faction in the Iranian government that wanted breakout was in the minority, and they were overruled by others who felt that Iran could project power more readily in a non-nuclear Middle East than one in which six or seven countries had nukes.

Severe ones, at times. Trump decided that strategic inaction wasn't a viable choice given all that's potentially about to happen in the Pacific and chose to end the threat now with what he had today.

Except he didn't. He didn't choose to end the threat. He chose to engage in an aerial campaign without ground troops. Which doesn't end Iran's nuclear capabilities - indeed, it barely will affect them from where they were before the war. They hadn't restarted the program, so there wasn't really anything left that hadn't been destroyed in the 12-day war. And it doesn't end Iran's nuclear ambitions, and indeed makes it far more likely that they won't stop short of breakout when they restart their program.