Noah Rothman, on today’s edition of The Editors, is firmly of the opinion “that if you were to tally up a ledger that the pro side vastly overwhelms the con side” of the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran, pushing back against the more somber outlook of some of his colleagues.

While he does “concede plenty of cons,” and agrees that the concerns over the Strait of Hormuz are legitimate, he says “that does not mean that this is not a resolvable problem . . . [or] that the United States has few options available to it to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Give me a break.”

“You only say that if you are not remotely familiar with the options that we’ve executed in the past and recently to open up the Strait of Hormuz,” Noah says.

Rich responds, saying, “This does strike me as really a seat-of-the-pants operation in part because we had a target of opportunity that drove it maybe earlier than ideally would have happened.” But Noah “fundamentally disagree[s] with the notion that what we’re looking at is improvisatory, given the nature of what we’ve witnessed over the last two weeks.”

To hear the rest of this discussion, and to catch Charlie and MBD’s comments, listen in below.

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

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