Trump Uses America's 'Levers of National Power' Against Iran to 'Scare Factions'

All right now on to other news. The U.S. has resumed the naval blockade of Iranian ports as President Trump looks for a solution to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Trump this week backed down on his threat of a 20 percent fee on all straits of Hormuz cargo shipping and tanker traffic. That is now and that is all stalled. But meanwhile, strikes between the U.S. and Iran continue. They'll continue until I say it's enough. I mean, they'll continue. They've been there. You know, the word the military likes to use is degrade. They've been degraded to a very low level. Ultimately, we'll hit energy targets. Yeah. Next week comes the power plants. Next week comes the bridges. The only way you can negotiate with these people is through strength. And the only strength is military strength. And that's what we've done. And I mean, literally, two days ago, we had a deal and then they broke it at the last moment. They broke. All right. To work with all this through, let's bring in retired U.S. Army industry colonel and author and columnist for Townhall dot com, Kurt Schlichter. Kurt, welcome to the program. A lot going on over there. Let's get Iran out of the way first. We've heard this line about doing the bridges, doing the power plants before. Trump kind of has to follow through and do it this time if he's going to put that threat on the table credibly. Does he? I mean, really, does he? Sometimes the threat is is more useful than actually doing it. Trump is doing some interesting here. He's using all America's levers of national power right now. The military one's getting a lot of the attention. But if you look, look behind it and see what else is going on when he gets out and talks, he's using information power. He's trying to scare factions of the Iranian government to control other factions of the Iranian government. He's using economic power. We're put we're putting ships through the Strait of Hormuz. We are also blockading the Iranians. That's going to strangle them. And he's using diplomatic power. You know, you had Arab countries flying missions on the side of Israel in a war. Israel is part of that is a diplomatic coup that those of us who've been watching the Middle East for 50 years. I mean, it's mind blowing. So when Trump says, well, you know, the only thing they understand is military power. Yeah, he's being a little cagey there because we're using all America's levers of national power. And the Iranians are going to be hard put to survive it intact. Yeah, well, I mean, look, I think we've spoken on this program before about what Treasury is doing to put the economic squeeze on them. But what about the concern? A little while ago, the Iranians just said, well, you know, if you carry through that threat, then our friends, the Houthis down in Yemen, are going to start attacking shipping at the Bab el-Mandab Strait, which connects the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea. Iran has this power to escalate a bit, don't they? Oh, they certainly do. They've got their proxies, although their proxies have gotten beaten around the head pretty good by both the United States and Israel. Israel launched an airstrike that took out a bunch of their leadership. And after that, they were, well, a little more better behaved. The fact is, the Iranians are kind of out of options. What are they going to do? Supply these guys with money? They don't have any. Supply them with arms? How are they going to get through the blockade? The Houthis fully understand that they are surrounded by enemies. When they're getting re-plussed up by the Iranians, yeah, they can talk big. When there's no more arms coming and they fired everything, their enemies are going to come and they're going to kill them all. I think the Houthis might not be so willing to go down in flames to give the Iranian IRGC a talking point.