No. of Recommendations: 17
Secondly, what you're missing is that Iran wants the Untouchability Factor that being nuclear-armed gives them - allows them to make all sorts of mischief under the shadow of a mushroom cloud going off someplace.
I'm not missing that. I know Iran wants a nuclear weapon. But they also want other things - they want the rest of the Gulf states to not go nuclear, they want to be able to use proxies without possibly precipitating a nuclear exchange, etc.
It's like Donald Trump and Greenland. Trump wants to acquire Greenland. That's not a bluff, it's not a lie, it's not strategic posturing - Trump genuinely wants the U.S. to have possession of Greenland. And Trump could seize Greenland within a few weeks of giving the order.
But he doesn't give that order. Because even though he wants Greenland - genuinely - he also doesn't want to have the consequences that come with grabbing Greenland. Which is why even though he's had the ability to grab Greenland for the last year and a half or so, he hasn't done it. From which we don't infer that he doesn't want Greenland - we infer that he wants Greenland but chooses not to do it because of the many things that grabbing Greenland would cause to happen.
Similarly, Iran genuinely and totally wants a nuclear weapon - but they weigh that against the consequences. They are constrained, not by lacking a desire for a nuke, but by the events that going nuclear would precipitate.
What is "peacetime"? When one looks at this through the Iranian lens they've been at war with us for 50 years.
Peacetime in the sense of not being in a hot war. If Iran has been at war with us for 50 years, they've refrained from seizing the strait from virtually that entire time. It's been a (mostly) "cold war," to coin a phrase - they've been engaged in a bitter and hostile contest to exert power and foment problems and inflict damage on us, but not at the level of large-scale military forces. Only when they were actively involved in a hot, direct war with us (or Iraq) have they taken that step.
Once you've raced to the very top of the escalation ladder and launched a hot war, actions that a country refrained from doing because they didn't want to start a hot war are now fully on the table.
