Let Iran Keep The Strait
It's The Only Way To Stop An Iranian Bomb
On today’s podcast we are happy to once again host J.J. McCullough, the popular Canadian YouTuber. We launched the conversation with a discussion of his thought provoking recent substack “3 Questions About Iran”. This first half of our conversation is mostly on Iran and the chances for peace. I made a strong pitch that the only way to stop an Iranian nuclear bomb, after the failure of the military options, is to let them keep the control of the Strait of Hormuz they have taken.
I really enjoy my conversations with J.J. He is a much more orthodox foreign policy thinker than I am. But unlike most orthodox foreign policy thinkers, J.J. relishes getting into the details, and always challenges my opinions with more perceptive questions than “Why do you hate America!?!?!”. I learn something every time I talk to J.J., and it was great to spend an hour diving in on Iran questions with him. This talk helped flesh out my growing conviction that Iran is the best custodian of the Strait of Hormuz going forward. You can read on for an explanation of why, or you can listen to the first part of my most recent conversation with J.J. here:
Hope? Under Trump?
This weekend has been one of the most hopeful of the conflict so far. That certainly wasn’t my expectation for a full three-day weekend of closed financial markets in the United States. The pattern of Trump escalating when the market is closed has been well established, and he was making threats over the course of the week. Today’s Memorial Day holiday in the US provided a full 72 hours for destruction before the markets open tomorrow.
Instead, it seems that every country in the Middle East other than Israel, even the UAE, banded together to pressure Trump towards peace. On Saturday night in particular there was an outpouring of joy on Twitter from real supporters of peace and the United States, and very satisfying whining from Israel First (really MIC first) traitors like Lindsey Graham, Mike Pompeo and Ted Cruz. By cutting the obstructive clown car of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff out of the process, Pakistan was able to push through a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to start a process to make a deal.
Maybe.
Already by Sunday and Monday cracks were showing. The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) still wants war, and not even the complete failure of their efforts over the past three months has kept them from recycling their tired talking points. Murdoch’s Fox News empire is claiming to have found another assassination plot against the Trump family. These stratagems to derail peace are all very old and tired, but so is Trump. He’s vulnerable to all this nonsense, and Iran has made it clear that they will not accept his usual public lying and misrepresentations about whatever deal they arrive at.
As I said in yesterday’s short. Trump is almost certain to fuck this up.
But let’s say some miracle happens, this 60 day MOU to have broader discussions is signed, and we move on to real negotiations, I believe there’s only one path to stopping a nuclear bomb: Let Iran keep the strait.
The War Failed
The Iran war that Washington, DC has been working towards for decades has failed completely.
The Trumpers keep talking about the importance of stopping an Iranian nuclear bomb, when their every action has made a nuclear bomb more likely.
What Trump has done:
Made the US completely untrustworthy. This one goes back to 2018. Back then he ripped up Obama’s Nuclear Deal, a complicated peace deal that had taken years to negotiate. Over the past year, he has attacked Iran and its leadership during active negotiations, not once, but twice, in June of 2025 and February of 2026. How could Iran ever trust us to honor any commitments we make in return for their not pursuing a nuke.
Removed the US’s biggest threat to Iran. For years, one of the greatest threats we held over Iran was our military power. Sure, we let Israel get away with all kinds of terrorism against Iran. Sure, we broke every deal we ever made with them. But Iran was still dissuaded from pursuing a bomb, or the regional hegemony it now has, because of the threat of US military power. They didn’t want to get bombed. That threat remained powerful. Now it’s gone. The seal has been broken. Iran is now operating in a different world, unconstrained by the fear of something they’ve already experienced and more than survived.
Made the US look weak. The US has unleashed its full military power in the Persian Gulf. It’s been a pretty damp squib. We murdered a lot of Iranian leaders and school girls. It looks like a jacked up version of the honor-free, genocidal, completely ineffectual nonsense that Israel specializes in.
The hawks aren’t wrong that there is more we could do militarily. We could go full “Saddam Hussein after losing in Kuwait” and take out Iran’s oil and gas infrastructure. But that would lead to Iran taking out the rest of the Gulf’s oil and gas infrastructure, mass starvation among the world’s poorer countries, and a massive worldwide economic crash, very much including the United States.
There is no military solution to an Iranian nuclear bomb. There is no way that Iran can ever trust the US government to honor any nuclear deal that it makes.
Many sensible commentators have jumped from these facts to the assumption that an Iranian nuclear weapon is inevitable. The region would then rush to proliferate, and we could be in the horrific, existentially terrifying situation of doubling the number of open nuclear weapons powers by the end of the 2020s.
We don’t have to do that.
Iran has already won everything it needs for its security. Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz has already been described as a “nuclear” option by many commentators. But it’s not just that, it’s an alternative to an Iranian nuclear weapon. Iran may now be rushing to build a bomb to protect itself from the savage aggression of Israel and the United States. It’s not the possibility of the bomb that is forcing Trump to the table, however… it’s Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz.
If Iran is allowed to keep control of the Strait of Hormuz, they have all the security they need. They will of course need to be incentivized to refrain from proliferation in other ways, like sanctions relief, and they should be, by way of reparations for Trump’s savage, unprovoked attack. But Iran’s security question is currently solved, without a nuclear weapon.
IF they are allowed to keep control of the Strait of Hormuz.
You can listen to J.J. and I discuss this option and a whole lot more on Spotify, or on YouTube below.