Middle East Insider · Issue 036 · Monday, August 3, 2026

The Suggestion Box

Good morning. The military command running the Iran war asked its own analysts this week for “new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran.” It is the right instinct, and the Forum has been publishing the answers for months. Below, the playbook CENTCOM is looking for, already in print. Then a short word of thanks to Tehran for my promotion to hybrid-warfare commander. Then the weekend: a strike called off by a phone call from Riyadh, a regime calling the President a liar, and a Saudi oil port having its busiest day in two weeks with every transponder switched off.

CENTCOM asked its troops for ideas. The Forum already published the playbook.

Give the command credit for the instinct. A senior officer in US Central Command’s intelligence branch this week asked a broad group of military analysts for “new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran” (CNN). CENTCOM’s spokesman put it well: “Admiral Cooper, in particular, reaches out to members of our great team, regardless of rank, to achieve the highest levels of operational performance possible.” A command that canvasses its own ranks for sharper ideas, and looks past the purely kinetic, is a command thinking the way this war requires. So let us answer the call.

The Forum has spent the year publishing exactly the unconventional playbook the request describes, and none of it requires a single additional sortie. Five points, all in print:

1. Hunt the archer, not the arrow. Stop trading strikes with proxies and target the regime that directs them, the argument the Forum made in Hunt the Archer, Not the Arrow. Degrading the IRGC is the objective the pause now interrupts.

2. Bankrupt the Guard, personally. Designate every IRGC-linked entity, freeze every accessible asset, and track the personal fortunes of commanders and their families until the security services must choose between funding repression and protecting their own wealth. That is the prescription in The Debt We Owe the Dead, which also calls for enforcing the existing directive to drive Iranian oil exports to zero.

3. Stand up a Treasury task force and an Iran Democracy Fund. A dedicated unit to dismantle the IRGC’s commercial empire across construction, telecoms, energy, and shipping, paired with a funding mechanism for internal opposition, is the spine of the Forum’s Comprehensive Strategy for Democratic Transition in Iran.

4. Use tailored deterrence, not blunt force. Precision sanctions on commanders and clerical elites rather than measures that empty the pockets of Tehran’s shopkeepers, cyber operations against command structures, and support for labor strikes and civil disobedience over armed insurgency, the model laid out in The Third Way.

5. Give the resistance a doctrine. The Forum’s The Shortest Way Through adapts the four-part Resistance Operating Concept, underground, auxiliary, guerrilla, and public, into a campaign of unrestricted political warfare designed not to shatter the IRGC but to induce it to defect. Reagan’s Operation QRHELPFUL cost under thirty million dollars and helped liberate a hundred million people. Starlink can pierce the blackout for a fraction of a bombing run.

The request is the right instinct, and it deserves a real answer. The lesson of this war is not that any one instrument failed but that no instrument wins alone: strikes without a financial and political campaign degrade hardware without moving the regime, and sanctions that spare the personal fortunes of the men who hold the guns leave the IRGC’s own wealth untouched. The No-Vacuum Doctrine says sequence the tools, do not choose among them, and the Forum has printed that sequence while the strikes ran. The one thing that would waste it is this weekend’s pause, which interrupts the degradation of the Guard that every prescription above depends on. The suggestion box is open. The playbook is already in it.

On my promotion to hybrid-warfare commander.

The mystery of the Ceuta crisis has been solved, and the answer comes courtesy of the Tehran Times. Fifty thousand people crossed from Morocco into Spain last week, and Iranian state media has identified the mastermind. Not Rabat. Not Madrid’s migration policy. The Middle East Forum. Specifically, two op-eds, according to the regime’s English-language mouthpiece: a piece Michael Rubin wrote for us urging Morocco toward a new Green March, and a column by Amine Ayoub, carried enough operational force between them to move 50,000 human beings across an international border.

There is something almost touching about a regime that spent four decades perfecting proxy warfare and the industrial-scale export of instability looking at a border surge in the western Mediterranean and concluding it bears the unmistakable fingerprints of a research institute in Philadelphia. So I accept the promotion. And if two op-eds can accomplish all this, Tehran should be genuinely terrified of the rest of our writings.

The Long View is up. Sunday’s essay, The Kingdom’s Choice, reads Saudi Arabia’s two tracks in the kingdom’s own Arabic: an American nuclear deal it can only unlock by normalizing with Israel, and a Turkish-Egyptian-Pakistani architecture it can invoke without normalizing anything. The essay is for premium members. Every Forum donor receives premium membership with our compliments; if your invitation has not arrived, write [email protected] and we will send your sign-up link. Not yet a donor? You can subscribe here.

Michael Rubin, Can the U.S. Navy Continue Replenishment at Sea for Its Iran and Houthi Operations? (Observer, Aug 2): after the IRGC struck a firm servicing American ships at Duqm and Oman broke the contract, the road to resupply runs through Somaliland’s Berbera.

MEF Observer, The Houthi Blockade Forces Berbera’s Proof of Concept (Aug 1): the blockade is a live test of the corridor that sits outside the Houthis’ reach.

MEF Online, The Mirage of the Riyadh Shield (Aug 2): why Saudi Arabia refuses to strike Tehran, and what it means for Israel, the perfect companion to Sunday’s Long View.

The dangerous pause.

Under diplomatic pressure from the Gulf, the President canceled the weekend’s planned strikes and said talks would resume Monday, announcing that Iran and “other Middle Eastern Countries” had asked for time to finish a deal built on the “Immediate, Complete, and Total” reopening of Hormuz (AP). The pressure had a phone number: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman called Trump to caution him, a conversation a source told CBS was “all about concern over the targets” (CBS). Even in retreat, Trump kept the threat: absent a deal, he would hit Iran “very hard” and intends to “win.”

Tehran spent the day denying it had asked for anything. Military officials called the President’s account “merely another lie and a desperate attempt to blackmail Gulf rulers,” insisting Iranian forces stood at the “highest level of readiness” (Anadolu). The Foreign Ministry confirmed there are “no current talks” with Washington and that it is working only with Oman on a “temporary safe route,” one that is “neither the current northern route nor the southern route” and that does not mean the strait will open (Reuters, MEMO). And on Monday the regime executed two men, Omid Behzad and Pouria Safvat, for allegedly passing coordinates and photographs of military sites to the Mossad during the strike waves (Anadolu).

Meanwhile the kingdom adapts. Yanbu on the Red Sea recorded its busiest day since the blockade began, five supertankers berthed at its crude terminals Saturday, as Riyadh runs its cross-country pipeline to bypass Hormuz (Bloomberg via AA). But it is loading in the dark: Yanbu is running entirely AIS-off, and tankers such as the Lesvos and the Desh Vaibhav crossed Bab al-Mandeb with transponders switched off (OilPrice). The global energy trade is adapting to Iranian sea terrorism by going invisible. And OPEC+ chose Sunday to add another 188,000 barrels a day for September, finishing its rollback of the 2023 cuts into a market the war has already turned upside down (AFP).

By the End-State Standard, a pause is only as good as the clock it starts. Halting the degradation of the Guard to permit “peace talks” hands Tehran the one thing it cannot manufacture under fire: time to rearm and reposition. The regime’s own conduct tells you how it reads the gesture. It calls the President a liar, refuses direct talks, routes its extortion through Muscat, and hangs two of its own citizens to lock down operational security, all in a single news cycle. That is not a government seeking an exit; it is a government that has concluded Western diplomacy is proof of American exhaustion. As this newsletter has written, the Gulf’s instinct is to buy quiet; the danger is that Washington mistakes quiet for progress.

Israel holds the line, Gaza to the buffer.

The pause has a logistics tell. Israeli media reported ten more US aerial refueling aircraft en route to Ben Gurion, lifting the total to forty and reversing a July plan to draw them down, the hardware of sustained deep-strike capacity kept in place despite the diplomatic lull (Anadolu).

On Gaza, Jerusalem is refusing to buy the disarmament fiction. Hamas says it agreed to hand over heavy weapons for an Israeli withdrawal; an Israeli official told AP the intelligence assessment is that Hamas “remains committed to rebuilding its military rather than genuinely demilitarizing,” and that the army will not withdraw from the more than sixty percent of Gaza it holds before that disarmament is real (AP). Over the weekend the IDF struck what it called five Hamas weapons depots; Gaza’s health ministry said the strikes destroyed medicine warehouses beside al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital and killed at least ten people, including children (Al Jazeera). Hamas’s long practice of nesting weapons in medical and humanitarian sites is why the two accounts can both be partly true; the civilian toll is why the strikes carry a cost Israel will answer for.

In Lebanon, the friction is over rubble and attribution. Israel detonated roughly 700 tons of explosives at Beaufort Castle to destroy a Hezbollah tunnel network, sending tremors a Lebanese agency measured at magnitude 3.8; President Aoun called it “a highly dangerous escalation” that threatens the framework agreement on the eve of the Rome talks (UPI). Then a cautionary tale for the wire desk: Beirut said five of its soldiers were wounded by a “hostile Israeli strike,” then walked the claim back to a “suspicious object,” while the IDF said the device was a Hezbollah explosive the soldiers drove over, in an area with no Israeli presence (JPost).

To the north, Israel kept enforcing its buffer: forces pushed into Quneitra and Daraa over the weekend, setting up checkpoints, searching civilians, and in one village installing and then removing a surveillance camera (Arab News). And the State Department told Americans in ten regional countries, Jordan among them, to prepare to leave, a fair reading of how thin this pause is (ABC).

The Carthage Doctrine holds that you defeat a rebuilding enemy by denying it the terrain to rebuild, which is precisely what the Beaufort demolitions and the Syrian buffer patrols do. Jerusalem’s refusal to trade withdrawal for a paper disarmament is the same logic applied to Gaza: the Reciprocity Standard asks what Hamas verifiably surrenders, and the honest answer is a promise. Two cautions keep the analysis clean. The Beaufort blasts and the Gaza warehouse strikes carry real civilian and diplomatic costs that a serious case must weigh, not wave away. And the Lebanese wounding shows why attribution discipline matters: the first wire said “Israeli strike,” the correction said Hezbollah’s own device. Get the archer right before you name him.

A crack in Sudan, a permission slip in Germany.

In the Horn, a tactical crack: an entire unit of the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary “Group 26,” surrendered to the Sudanese army in Omdurman with its full equipment, received by a founding RSF commander who defected in April (Anadolu). One surrendering officer urged former comrades to abandon a war he described as driven by racial and regional grievance. With Emirati arms deliveries reportedly disrupted by the wider war, it is worth watching whether the fracture widens.

In Libya, factions convened to discuss advancing a political process to end the endless transitional phases (MEMO). Talks that leave the Turkish- and Qatari-backed militias of Tripoli armed are talks about nothing.

And two European data points. Spain confirmed that more than 48,300 migrants have been returned to Morocco from Ceuta, the border surge Tehran has generously credited to our op-eds, and a live demonstration that mass migration remains an asymmetric weapon against European stability (MEMO). Meanwhile a German regional court in Zweibrücken ruled that comparing Israel to the Nazi regime is not a criminal offense, acquitting a user who paired the comparison with a swastika, on free-speech grounds (MEMO).

The through-line from Khartoum to Zweibrücken is the same one the Forum documents daily: hard power fractures when the money and the arms stop flowing, and soft power decays when institutions lose the will to name a threat. The RSF unit surrendered because its supply line thinned. The German court blessed the oldest antisemitic slander because the legal culture no longer treats it as one.

The number of transponders switched on at Saudi Arabia’s Yanbu oil port during its busiest loading day since the Houthi blockade (OilPrice). Five supertankers loaded crude in the dark, and the tankers that carried it slipped through Bab al-Mandeb invisible. When the world’s largest crude exporter has to hide its own ships in its own waters, that is not a market adjusting to risk. That is a chokehold, and the pause does nothing to break it.

If CENTCOM is taking suggestions, so are we: forward this brief to someone who still thinks the choice in Iran is between a bombing run and a paralysis. The Long View runs every Sunday for premium members, and every Forum donor gets premium with our compliments; if your invitation has not arrived, write [email protected]. The fall briefing tour is filling across six regions; to host an evening, write Nikki Ellis ([email protected]) and me ([email protected]).

Reply and tell me: if you had the CENTCOM inbox, what would you put in the suggestion box? I read every answer.