“The damage is incredibly painful to the regime. ... You can’t continue to fight if you can’t pay your officers. If you can’t financially sustain the war, that’s a fatal problem,” JISS expert tells JNS.
On Monday afternoon, President Donald Trump issued a public warning, threatening, yet again, to dismantle Iran’s remaining energy and water infrastructure if a negotiated settlement is not reached.
Declaring that the United States is in discussions with a “new, and more reasonable, regime,” Trump warned that if Iran kept threatening regional economic interests, American forces would “blow up and completely obliterate all [Iranian] Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island,” referring to the critical port and oil depot.
This threat comes on the tail end of a long series of back-and-forth threats between Trump and Iranian officials, with each side threatening the other’s economic and energy interests. This rhetorical tit-for-tat underscores a defining characteristic of the Iran war. Rather than turning on the conquest of territory, the destruction of leadership or the elimination of warfighting capacity, this war increasingly spins on the orbit of economic and energy pressure.
“Whether you like it or not, this is an energy war,” Israeli security analyst Gilad Cohen observed in a recent post.
