🇺🇸🇮🇷 Washington's new plan is to strangle Iran's economy with unprecedented pressure... but 3,000 years of Silk Road trade stand in the way

Bloomberg says the sanctions rollout comes next week, billed as the harshest economic isolation ever applied to a country.

Malcolm Nance spent a career in naval intelligence around these waters, and his response is a walk across the map: six open Pakistani crossings, Caspian barges from Russia, Azeri cousins trading across the border, and dhows from Dubai Creek that never stopped sailing all war.

Squeeze a bazaar civilization, he argues, and the black market simply becomes the open market, because "Logistics is war."

His sharpest praise lands on the Joint Chiefs chairman for concluding that more strikes would just waste ordnance breaking rocks without reopening the strait, which Malcolm calls exactly what a real military leader is supposed to do.

Malcolm also pushes back on the carrier catapult reversal, arguing the electromagnetic system exists for one reason: launch rate.

A carrier's survival depends on getting its entire air wing off the deck before 300 inbound cruise missiles arrive, the new system recovers instantly while steam has to repressurize between launches, and China just installed the same technology on its third carrier because Beijing understood the math.@MalcolmNance