Iran: Before the Next Move
(Noon Eastern Time)
Donald Trump is talking about whacking Iran again. On Saturday, after casting an early ballot in Florida, he said the United States was “thinking about doing it, and maybe tomorrow,” or might reach “a nice, big, beautiful agreement” instead. Today he said there would be no strike today, and that he’s weighing a deal or action to “finish them off.” On October 8 he promised no attack before the midterms on November 3. A week later he told a rally crowd in Alaska, “Wait till you see what we do to Iran.” NPR reports that American and Israeli planners have drawn up a short, intensive campaign for early November. The White House and Pentagon have plans to use the Mother of All Bombs (MOAB). Pickaxe Mountain, a deeply buried nuclear-related facility in Iran, has been named out loud. “We may have to go there,” Trump said. “We’ll knock it out fast.”
Meanwhile, Netanyahu faces Israeli voters on October 27. After Trump endorsed him, he told voters “we have crushed Iran” and promised to “eliminate the Iranian threat over the next two years, or even sooner.” Trump says the war will end very quickly after the midterms. Since, as usual, there never has been a comprehensive plan to end the war (beyond the dysfunctional “I'll hit you harder!”), it is no wonder the two allies are singing different verses from the same hymnal.
So, let’s look around the chess board before the next move is played. There’s a lot going on that I haven’t had time to mention lately.
I’ve said since May that whoever controls Hormuz is winning the war. But control needs a refined definition now. Iran can still make Hormuz dangerous. It can no longer count on that danger working in their favor, however. That is a game-changer.
Oil through the Strait is back to about 82 percent of prewar levels. Counting the pipelines that go around it, more oil is now leaving the Gulf than before the war, more than 24 million barrels a day last week against 23.3 million per day in late February. This is in spite of the fact that more tankers were attacked in October than in any other time during the war. Iran has never tried harder to control Hormuz, and the world has become better at moving oil despite it.
Did the IRGC really think their bluff would last forever as long as “unknown projectiles” were hitting a few ships? This is OIL we are talking about. There are few things more precious on the planet right now. The world needs oil like an addict needs their drug. So, being improvisers, humans are finding a way.
Tehran still offers to “reopen” the Strait if Washington meets its conditions. It is harder to sell the reopening of something that is already mostly open. Perhaps out of frustration, an IRGC spokesman recently proclaimed Iran is “a superpower,” a phrase they have not used in that manner since the war started. On the same day, Mohsen Rezaei, head of the Supreme National Security Council, admitted Iran would suffer from a prolonged blockade. It seems they are singing different verses in the Iranian hymnal too.
These are small but meaningful admissions. For the first time in this war, I think Iran is losing strategically. That does not give strategic victory to the US by default, however. Oil is still near $109 a barrel and nobody in Washington has described what comes after the next round of bombing. “100% complete victory” I suppose will be the claim.
Thousands of civilians have been killed in this war, and the accumulating toll barely registers as news. In Iran, the counting mostly stopped in April. As of April 7, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) had documented 3,636 deaths, including 1,701 civilians, at least 254 of them children. Iran’s Health Ministry put civilian deaths at 2,362, with more than 32,000 injured. Its reported death toll through the June memorandum was 3,468, including seven infants, 376 children and 496 women. At least 50 more were killed in July. An 88-day internet blackout and almost no access for journalists have made the record harder to reconstruct.
Israel lost 24 people to Iranian missiles through April, all civilians. The Gulf states lost about 45 to 50 civilians before the Houthis started hitting various targets in Saudi Arabia, killing more than 20 people and injuring hundreds.
Iraq’s reported toll exceeds 146, civilians and militia together. Another account records 32 killed by militia drones in Kurdistan. Some of those may overlap. About 24 seafarers have died in the Hormuz crisis. The Pentagon lists 21 Americans dead, a figure The Intercept says has been revised up and down since April without explanation. That’s a separate category from the civilian count.
By historical standards, the reported Iranian toll is low for the force used, something I previously pointed out. Then there are the people killed by their own government. Estimates of the January protest crackdown run from about 6,500 to more than 30,000. The government admits 3,117. Even the uncertainty is enormous. The regime may have killed more Iranians in January than the bombing has killed since.
Remember the nuclear program? The reason all of this started?
On September 9, the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) referred Iran to the UN Security Council for the first time in 20 years, by 23 votes to 5, with Russia, China and Niger against. The agency still can’t verify Iran’s 441 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent, a short technical step from weapons grade. It believes more than 200 kilograms survived the bombing, in tunnels at Isfahan and at Natanz.
Rezaei declared “not a single gram” of enriched uranium will leave Iran. President Pezeshkian says Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons. Some Iranian officials have been publicly calling for a nuclear device, as a deterrent if nothing else. Though I suspect deterrence is more offensive-minded than any of them will admit. Secretary Rubio says the nuclear question is “at the core” of the American approach. After eight months of Hormuz, Yemen and Riyadh, the original problem is back where it started, unsolved.
Pickaxe Mountain sits just over a mile from Natanz, and its tunnels are reportedly deeper than Fordow’s. Reports say planners have considered the Mother of All Bombs, a 21,600-pound blast weapon, for use there. But that one doesn’t burrow. The bomb that penetrates is the 30,000-pound GBU-57, the one used on Fordow in June 2025, after which Trump said the target was “obliterated.” Apparently, one obliteration wasn’t enough. Mr. 100%. Haha.
Just as humorous in a dark way is Iran’s ghost of a Supreme Leader. Mojtaba Khamenei has held that position, theoretically the strongest political office in the Iranian state, since March. He has not made an authenticated public appearance since. He didn’t even show up for his father’s funeral in July. In August, Iran released undated audio of him grading a seminary thesis on the “Islamic Security Model,” 19.5 out of 20. A video billed as his first appearance during the Pakistani army chief’s visit in August turned out to have been online before the visit. The IRGC says he continues to run the country under wartime limits.
Trump, meanwhile, says Iran’s “first string leaders are all gone,” along with the second string and half the third, that nobody wants the job, and that the United States might have gone “too far” in killing Iran’s leaders. “We don’t know who the hell we’re dealing with.” Israel’s decapitation strike helped produce an IRGC-dominated state whose negotiating authority Washington now struggles to identify. Seems no one thought how the war might end if the IRGC simply filled the void. No one still knows.
On October 18 parliament confirmed Mehrdad Akhlaghi Ketabchi as defense minister, 237 to 15. He spent 42 years in Iran’s weapons industry, worked alongside Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, the father of their missile program, and has been under UN sanctions since 2007 and US sanctions since 2008. The IRGC general who had held the ministry as acting minister since March moved into the president’s office as an adviser.
The regular army now speaks the IRGC’s line. Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari claims “100% control and supervision” of the Strait, IRGC to the west, army to the east. Army spokesman Mohammad Akraminia says the Strait reopens when the United States leaves the region: “If it does not leave, we will expel it.” Seems all sides offer members to the “100% Club.”
A ray of hope might be found in the fact that Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi survived an impeachment push over his contact with US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff. Meanwhile, inside Iran, things are getting pretty ugly. And I’m not talking about the bombing campaign.
The rial was near 2.69 million to the dollar in early October and has lost more than half its value in a year. Official inflation hit 88.6 percent in June. Oil exports have reportedly ground to a halt. A Treasury official said no Iranian cargo had been unloaded anywhere in October. Kpler told the Wall Street Journal that Iran’s floating oil stocks outside the blockade ran out in mid-October, the reserve that had kept sales to China going.
An aide to Pezeshkian says imports are down 25 percent since the southern ports were blockaded. Crossings with Pakistan and Iraq have closed and freight at the Turkish border is disrupted. Washington says it can sustain the blockade “for the foreseeable future.” Iran’s central bank chief says reserves will last through Trump’s term. An Iranian lawmaker says most of the economic damage comes from mismanagement, not sanctions. Pezeshkian calls it “the worst situation,” neither war nor peace.
And the executions keep coming. HRANA counts at least 2,003 executions in the past year, the most in ten reporting periods, and 1,075 since the start of 2026. Amnesty says Iran’s Supreme Court has upheld death sentences for at least 20 more protesters from the January uprising. Prisoners in 62 facilities keep up a weekly hunger strike against executions. Iraq has agreed to remove or hand over Iranian Kurdish opposition figures. The UN’s special rapporteur says the war intensified repression.
This story of simple decline is complicated by the Houthis, who were supposed to be an IRGC agent. In my last post I described a missile campaign that had closed Riyadh’s international airport, killed passengers and airport workers, hit Aramco’s headquarters in Dhahran and brought missiles over Medina. The pressure reaches beyond the immediate damage. Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 depends on investment, tourism and confidence in the kingdom’s stability.
The Houthis were supposed to choke the Red Sea for Tehran. They did for a while, then apparently Houthi leader Yusuf al-Madani decided to return to their own war with Riyadh. Instead of a different verse, they are singing a different song. The war is supposed to be against Israel and the US guys. Guys?
The Saudi-assisted Yemeni counter-offensive is supposed to make things right. Re-taking coastal territory and making Bab el-Mandeb safer would be important. But, it would not automatically eliminate launch sites in the highlands around Sanaa and Saada. Yemen is still the strongest piece on Tehran’s side of the board, even if Tehran isn’t the one moving it.
Then there are the Iranian initiatives in Iraq and Lebanon. The IRGC has supported Iraqi militia activity directed mostly at the Saudis. In September, drones launched from Iraq’s Maysan province shut down Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, its main route around Hormuz. The last American troops left Iraq on September 30. Kata’ib Hezbollah called it “the beginning of full sovereignty.” Prime Minister al-Zaidi has given the militias until June 2027 to disarm. Kata’ib Hezbollah and Harakat al-Nujaba refuse. The ones that signed a disarmament framework expect to keep their weapons anyway.
Iraq says the war has cost it about $60 billion in oil revenue. Its oil money sits at the New York Federal Reserve, and Washington uses the dollar to push Baghdad against the militias. Iraq closed a border crossing with Iran under that pressure.
Lebanon is Iran’s weakest card. Hezbollah hasn’t claimed an attack on Israel since the June ceasefire. When the Lebanese government seized 1,100 pounds of its explosives, a Hezbollah lawmaker admitted the shipment was theirs and demanded it back. Rubio instructed Lebanon’s President Joseph Khalil Aoun not to return it. In theory the state will no longer tolerate illegal weapons.
Israel holds a security zone in the south and says it won’t leave until Hezbollah disarms, which Hezbollah refuses to do. Aoun asks Washington to stop Israeli bulldozing in farmers’ fields. Lebanon remains one of Iran’s conditions for peace in every set of conditions it has offered. But Israel has been effective in muzzling Hezbollah which leaves the IRGC with little left there to bargain with compared with the leverage the situation once supplied.
By attacking most of its neighbors and generally disrupting life throughout the region, Iran has isolated itself from everyone except the Russians and the Chinese. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was in Tehran last week, and Araghchi said the two countries have never “worked as closely” together. China’s premier publicly condemned the US-Israeli strikes and backed Iranian sovereignty. Russia fed Iran targeting intelligence early in the war, and its oil revenues swelled with the price spike. Russia and China vetoed the UN resolution on Hormuz back in April. Chinese components keep turning up in Houthi missiles.
Trump says the critics who think Russia and China are helping Iran are “Radical Left Morons,” and that if they are helping, “it’s at a very low level, but I don’t believe they are at all.” This month he paused sanctions on Russian diesel, and his administration has considered easing sanctions on Iran’s own shadow fleet tankers to bring down freight rates.
The bill for all this in the US isn’t cheap. The Pentagon said about $25 billion early on, nearly $29 billion in May, $37.5 billion in July. It has requested an $87.6 billion supplemental. NBC’s sources put the real figure closer to $100 billion. Whatever the number it is less than the jolt this war has delivered to the American consumer.
Moody’s estimates higher fuel, food and airfare have cost American consumers about $132 billion. Gasoline was $4.33 a gallon last week against $2.98 before the war. Diesel hit a record. September inflation came in at 3.7 percent, with gasoline up 34.2 percent in a year.
In December, two months before the war, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George warned that Patriot and THAAD stocks would stay critically low until 2030. Secretary of War Hegseth ousted him in April. Trump’s answer to the leaks about the depleted magazine: “In the old days, we used to shoot leakers.”
The Senate passed a war powers resolution 50 to 48. Democrats are again demanding the “true cost.” Sixty percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran as of this post. Iran’s worsening position does not refill an American launcher or refund an American driver.
On March 1 I wrote that by killing a sitting head of state, Israel and Washington had broken an American norm established by Ronald Reagan’s Executive Order 12333 four decades ago. On October 23 the Director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton, sent Rubio a memo saying Iran has “substantially increased” efforts to target American diplomats and officials in the Middle East and beyond, with lethal plots in “advanced stages.”
Embassy staffs were cut in the UAE, Lebanon, Qatar and Jordan. Diplomats and families are leaving Saudi Arabia. A senior Iranian security official told Fars that a renewed war involving assassinations would bring retaliation against American political targets.
Europe has been living with the other end of it. Britain’s MI5 chief says Iran and Russia have opened “a new era” of hybrid attacks, with more than 50 arrests in Britain in a year. A German court convicted two men of plotting to kill Jewish leaders on Quds Force orders. A Norwegian teenager got 20 years in Britain for an Iran-linked contract killing plot.
Those cases began before this war. So Epic Fury did not stimulate Iranian assassination operations. But the latest threats suggest how that machinery could now be used in retaliation. Trump’s “too far” comes close to acknowledging a consequence of decapitation that the victory declarations left out. As we have discovered, killing the people at the top can make it harder to identify who has authority to negotiate. This war may morph into something even uglier yet.
That’s the board before the next move. Iran has lost or is losing control of most of it. The once seemingly comprehensive plan has fragmented. It’s lost its queen and a bunch of other pieces. But it can still hurt its neighbors and hold down its own people. Whether that buys it a settlement is another question. Washington can strike again. It still hasn’t explained how hitting them harder is going to resolve the present crisis.
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