Hold the Line

Hold the Line

Two nights, roughly 170 targets, and a regime that answered by firing on four American partners while burying its leader. Deterrence made its first payment on months of arrears. The only way to lose it now is to fly back to Doha.

Good morning. Overnight, CENTCOM finished its second wave in two nights: roughly 90 more targets, on top of Tuesday’s 80-plus, aimed at everything the IRGC uses to hold a fifth of the world’s oil hostage. Iran’s answer came at dawn, and it is a map of the regime’s mind: missiles and drones at American positions in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar, and another salvo of ballistic missiles at Jordan. Tehran is not signaling a wish to talk. It is signaling that it would rather widen the war than loosen its grip on the strait.

The President has done the correct and overdue thing: he stopped paying for restraint Iran never delivered and started charging for aggression it never stopped. The temptation now, urged by every institutional reflex in Washington, will be to bank the strikes and fly back to Doha. This issue closes with the Forum’s argument for why that would snatch defeat from a tactical victory. First, the operational picture.

Gregg Roman · July 9, 2026

In today’s brief:

• Two nights, one hundred seventy targets
• The morning reply: three Gulf states and Jordan
• The strait by the numbers: severe, and priced accordingly
• The fronts Israel holds: Rome, the pilot zones, and Gaza’s one trusted army
• The Forum’s argument to Washington: hold the line

Degradation is arithmetic. Deterrence is psychology. Both got a down payment.

The second wave was bigger than the first. CENTCOM reported that U.S. forces struck approximately 90 Iranian military targets overnight into this morning: air defense systems, coastal surveillance assets, missile and drone storage and maintenance sites, naval capabilities, and military logistics infrastructure along Iran’s coastline, all selected “to further degrade Iran’s ability to attack commercial shipping and innocent civilian mariners in the Strait of Hormuz” (CENTCOM via ABC News, IranWire). Combined with Tuesday’s 80-plus targets and 60-plus IRGC small boats, that is roughly 170 aim points in 48 hours against the machinery of maritime extortion. The command says its forces remain “vigilant, lethal, and prepared to execute operations directed by the Commander in Chief” (CENTCOM). Trump’s framing was plainer: “This is in retribution for yesterday’s bombing of ships by Iran. If it happens again, it will get much worse!” (NBC). And by this morning, a familiar softness had already crept back in: the President told reporters Iran “wants to make a deal.”

Tehran’s ledger of the damage: 14 killed and 78 wounded over the two days, by its health ministry’s count, across five provinces per state media (NBC, Reuters via CNA); its foreign ministry called the strikes a “gross war crime,” pointing to two downed railway bridges on the route to Mashhad, one of which NBC geolocated in Golestan province, with Iranian officials suspending the Tehran-Mashhad passenger line (NBC). The bridge strikes were reportedly delivered by cruise missiles, the first infrastructure targets hit since the April ceasefire, and went unmentioned in CENTCOM’s statement. The burial train route to the Supreme Leader’s own funeral now runs through a repair schedule.

Two honest cautions belong in the record, both of which argue for more pressure, not less. First, ISW assesses that strikes on this pattern “have had no visible effect on Iran’s ability to threaten shipping” so far, because the extortion model needs only small numbers of projectiles fired at individual hulls; the calculus in Tehran has not yet moved (ISW). Second, the pause Washington sold as diplomacy was a rearmament window: a U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal that since the April ceasefire Iran has fielded portable radars to replace destroyed fixed sites and has dug out or repaired hundreds of missiles and launchers, restoring access to more than half its pre-war stockpile (WSJ via ISW). Every week of “process” bought the Guard another convoy of reconstituted launchers.

Call this week what it is: the Reciprocity Standard enforced for the first time since Islamabad, cost finally indexed to conduct. But degradation is arithmetic and deterrence is psychology; the first is done from the air, the second only by convincing the other side you will keep coming back. That is why ISW’s caution is not an argument against the strikes, it is the argument for their continuation: a regime that rebuilt half its missile stockpile under cover of a ceasefire has told you exactly what it does with pauses. And note the tell to watch: Trump has reportedly told advisers he will not “resume the war” unless Iran kills American servicemembers (ISW). Tehran reads that threshold as a menu, and this morning’s “Iran wants to make a deal” is the same tell in a different key. The Iran Freedom Project holds the endline as ever: the target that matters is not the launcher, it is the system that builds them.

Iran answered a strike on its coastline by firing on four American partners.

At dawn the regime chose escalation over introspection. Iran’s armed forces attacked U.S. military infrastructure across the Gulf: the army said it sent drones at Patriot batteries in Kuwait, hit an early-warning satellite antenna in Qatar, and struck a U.S. fuel depot in Bahrain; the IRGC claimed attacks on “key infrastructure” at Arifjan and Ali Al Salem in Kuwait and Juffair and Sheikh Isa in Bahrain (Reuters via CNA, SBS). Kuwait’s armed forces engaged a cruise missile, three ballistic missiles, and ten drones, with one person injured by falling shrapnel; a day earlier Kuwait had intercepted two ballistic missiles and thirteen drones, with shrapnel knocking out power lines (Reuters via CNA, AP via ABC7). And Iran again turned its launchers on Jordan, as it did in June: the IRGC claims it fired ten ballistic missiles at the Azraq air base, while Amman reports its air defenses intercepted eight missiles with no injuries or damage (Reuters via CNA).

The Arab response is coalescing exactly as it should. Egypt has now issued three condemnations in two days, two for the tanker attacks and one for the “repeated Iranian attacks on Kuwait, Bahrain, and other Gulf states,” calling them a blatant violation of sovereignty (Ahram Online). Kuwait reserved the right to respond to what it called “sinful and repeated Iranian aggressions.” Saudi Arabia condemned the attacks on Jordan, Bahrain, and Kuwait this morning, holding Iran responsible “for the consequences of its continued aggression,” and the GCC’s secretary-general denounced “the repeated treacherous Iranian attacks” (Arab News Japan). Qatar, whose mediation portfolio now includes being shot at, briefly declared an elevated security threat, condemned the strikes on its neighbors, and called for a return to diplomacy (Reuters via CNA). Riyadh’s tanker was hit on Tuesday despite three years of dutiful “reconciliation” with Tehran, a lesson in what that policy purchased.

Iran has now put ordnance into or over the territory of at least four American partners in forty-eight hours, and the pattern deserves a name: this is not retaliation, it is hostage-taking at the state level, the same toll-booth logic applied to countries instead of tankers. Accords Logic says the moment is convertible: a Sunni bloc that spent the spring hedging is watching its skies get cleared by American interceptors, and the coalition that failed to congeal around a memorandum can congeal around a common air picture. And a new corollary for the file: neutrality is not a defense against a regime that prices neutrality as weakness. Ask Riyadh’s shipowners. Ask Amman’s air defense crews, who just ran the regional integration exercise nobody scheduled.

“Severe,” says the meter. The market and the regulators agree.

Strip out the communiqués and read the instruments. The Joint Maritime Information Center, the U.S. Navy-led clearinghouse for Gulf shipping, raised its Strait of Hormuz threat level to “severe,” its first since mid-June, meaning an attack on shipping is highly likely; it counts 61 confirmed vessel incidents since March 1 and notes continued IRGC “attacks, hailing, UAS activity, and targeted surveillance” of commercial traffic (Seatrade Maritime). The volume numbers tell the story Washington’s negotiators kept averting their eyes from: the U.S. assisted 37 transits across July 5-6, roughly 24 to 25 ships a day, against a pre-war norm of 138 (Seatrade Maritime). Europe’s aviation regulator drew the same map in the sky: EASA told airlines to avoid Iranian, Iraqi, and Lebanese airspace through August 31, even as it lifted its cautions for Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE (Reuters). The threat geography is exactly where the regime is.

Markets rendered a cool verdict: Brent jumped 6.3 percent to $78.80 and WTI 6.4 percent to $75.00 on the “over” declaration, real money but far beneath the $100-plus peaks of the war’s opening phase (AP via ABC7). Traders are pricing a degraded Iran, not a closed strait. Meanwhile the regime keeps confessing its theory of the waterway out loud: parliamentarian Alaeddin Boroujerdi said commercial traffic must run under IRGC Navy “oversight and management,” and the foreign ministry insists the memorandum’s Clause 5 makes passage arrangements Iran’s to determine (ISW). ISW’s read is the correct one: having failed to win diplomatic recognition of its control, most recently when a joint U.S.-GCC statement refused it, Tehran is trying to coerce the Gulf states into conceding what negotiation would not (ISW).

The Hormuz Mandate gets its cleanest statement of the war this week: you cannot toll a strait you cannot hold, so Tehran’s fallback is to make sure nobody else can hold it either, one projectile at a time. The counter is not a communiqué; it is the number 138. That is the restoration target, the pre-war daily transit count, and every policy, strike package, and escort schedule should be graded against it. A “severe” rating with 24 transits a day is not a bargaining environment, it is a hostage count, and the July 17 wind-down deadline now squeezing Tehran’s oil receipts is the other blade of the scissors. Keep both closing.

Beirut will fly to Rome. The pilot zones haven’t moved an inch.

Lebanon confirmed it will attend the Rome talks on July 15-16, after briefing reporters for a week that attendance was conditional on Israeli withdrawal from the two “pilot zones” established by the June framework (ISW). Note what has actually happened on the ground: nothing. ISW has observed no IDF withdrawals and no Lebanese Armed Forces deployments to the zones, while Lebanese media report the LAF refuses to deploy and disarm Hezbollah in those areas until Israel leaves the south entirely, and Israeli officials repeat that the IDF stays until Hezbollah is disarmed (ISW). That is not a sequencing dispute; it is the entire war in miniature. The framework asks the LAF to disarm its landlord, and the LAF has now said the quiet part: not until Israel leaves. Which means never.

The MoU’s collapse, meanwhile, quietly liberates Jerusalem. An Israel that spent three weeks watching Washington negotiate its northern rules of engagement in rooms it was excluded from now faces no functioning memorandum to be pressured into honoring. The Forum’s new analysis by Lazar Berman documents the cost of the alternative: the Ankara summit and Trump’s F-35 opening have boosted Turkey’s standing while “slumping” Israel watches its regional clout erode, with partners cooperating on initiatives against its wishes (MEF / Berman). And in Gaza, the Forum’s Amine Ayoub identifies the quiet story inside the stabilization mission everyone else counts wrong: of the countries pledged to the International Stabilization Force, the army Israel actually trusts on the ground is Morocco’s, “experienced, religiously credible,” and carrying no Hamas back channel, while Egypt got the photo op (MEF / Ayoub). Rabat’s soldiers inside Gaza are the Abraham Accords made kinetic.

The Post-Aid Alliance ledger runs through this whole section: Israel’s security this week is a function of what it holds, not what is signed on its behalf, and the collapse of the MoU costs Jerusalem nothing because Jerusalem never banked it. Rome is worth attending only under the Reciprocity Standard: the LAF earns each pilot zone by disarming Hezbollah inside it, with Israeli withdrawal following verified performance, never preceding it. And Ayoub’s Morocco point deserves elevation into doctrine: Accords Logic was always about who shows up when the shooting starts. Morocco showed up. Ankara showed up on the other side of the ledger, collecting engine contracts. Washington should grade its allies by that column.

Hold the line. The literature, the ledger, and the last three weeks all say the same thing.

This is the section the administration’s next decision should be tested against. The strikes work only if they are the beginning of a policy rather than the end of a tantrum, and the scholarly record is blunt about why. The classic account of coercive diplomacy in the Cuban missile crisis, Alexander George’s, surveyed by Levy, notes that Kennedy “believed that it was essential to begin with coercive threats and actions... in order to demonstrate his own credibility and reverse any image of weakness” and only then discuss concessions; coercion first, diplomacy after the adversary’s calculus moves, never the reverse (Scholar Gateway: Levy 2008). The broader compellence literature warns that threats and token strikes fail far more often than they succeed, roughly two times in three, precisely because adversaries read minimal, casualty-averse force as a “cheap threat,” a weak signal of resolve (Art & Greenhill 2018). Cheap threats are what the last three weeks of waivers and venue-shopping were. Two nights of real cost are the first expensive signal Washington has sent since April. The Forum’s six imperatives:

One. Do not go back to Doha or Islamabad while Iranian ordnance flies. The regime uses talks as reload time; the WSJ-reported reconstitution data, half the missile stockpile recovered under a ceasefire, is the controlled experiment. Talks resume when tankers transit unmolested, not before.

Two. Make the license revocation permanent, then go upstream. The July 17 wind-down deadline is squeezing the regime’s dollar pipeline; the next targets are the shadow fleet and the Chinese refiners and financial nodes that clear its cargoes. Sanctions are a siege, not a gesture.

Three. Price the next attack in advance. If American bases take another salvo, the target set should climb the chain: IRGC senior command and the nuclear-threshold infrastructure the regime believes is sacrosanct. Published escalation ladders are how thresholds stop being menus.

Four. Arm the allies at the speed of the war. Accelerate precision munitions, interceptors, and penetrating ordnance to Israel and the Gulf partners whose skies absorbed this morning’s barrage. Deterrence is a coalition capability, and interceptor magazines are its currency.

Five. Scrap the deconfliction cell. A mechanism that seats Iran and excludes Israel exists to constrain the wrong party. Back Israel’s dismantlement campaign in Lebanon without an American chaperone; the Carthage Doctrine applies to proxies whose ceasefires are reload schedules.

Six. Name the endgame. The strikes restore deterrence; only the Iranian people end the threat. The regime is fracturing in public, with the Assembly of Experts publicly rebuking the Supreme National Security Council, in effect, for moving beyond Mojtaba’s “red lines,” the clearest elite split of the succession (MEF / Golkar & Aarabi). Pressure widens seams. The Iran Freedom Project is the standing conclusion: regime change as the objective, the Iranian people as the instrument, Israel and its allies leading the non-kinetic phase, and America holding, this time actually holding, the leverage.

The number of ships that transited the Strait of Hormuz daily before the war, against 24 to 25 a day now, with the threat meter at “severe.” Not the communiqués, not the venues, not the tranches: that number is the war’s actual scoreboard, and the only honest definition of victory in the strait is its restoration on terms Tehran does not set. (Source: JMIC via Seatrade Maritime.)

• Saeid Golkar & Kasra Aarabi, The Iranian Regime Is Fracturing; Open Conflict Could Be Next (July 7): the Assembly of Experts against the SNSC, in public
• Ali Almrayatee, Washington’s Blindspot Toward Baghdad’s False Reform (July 9): the “anti-corruption” raids as weaponized state institutions
• Lazar Berman, NATO Summit and Trump’s Support for F-35s Sale Boost Turkey’s Standing, as Slumping Israel Sees Clout Erode (July 8)
• Amine Ayoub, The Only Army in Gaza Israel Actually Trusts Isn’t Egypt’s; It’s Morocco’s (July 7)
• Potkin Azarmehr, When Foreign Journalists Become an Instrument of the Regime (July 8): the funeral’s Western stenographers
• Jose Lev Alvarez, Israel’s Balkan Network Is a Hedge Against Geopolitical Isolation (July 8)

Two favors this morning. Forward this issue to one person who thinks the next move is a flight to Doha, and if the Forum’s case for holding the line is one you want made in Washington every day, support it directly. The Forum runs on readers, not the governments it tries to move.

That is the board for today. Reply and tell me where you sit: policy, press, government, or just paying attention. I read these.

Middle East Insider · From Gregg Roman, Executive Director, Middle East Forum

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