There are two campaigns in this war: the American tiger and the Israeli badger. The saber-toothed tiger brings mass, reach, and the power to shake the whole region. The honey badger brings speed, nerve, and an almost personal determination to dig out launchers, drone cells, command posts, and the regime men hiding behind them. That is more or less what we are watching over Iran.

Israel is running a narrow, aggressive air war meant to break Iran’s ability to function: launchers, drone cells, command posts, Basij and IRGC facilities, air defenses, and the people and systems that make the regime dangerous. It is a campaign built around a short kill chain. Find it, fix it, hit it, move on.

The American campaign is larger and more expensive because it is buying more than strikes. Washington is hitting targets in Iran, but it is also defending bases, backing Gulf partners, flying the tanker bridge, managing missile defense, and trying to keep the region’s commercial plumbing from bursting. Both countries are degrading Iran. Only one of them is also underwriting the wider theater.

That is why Hormuz matters. John Konrad’s point, and it is best read as a sharp hypothesis rather than settled fact, is that the Strait is no longer simply “closed” or “open.” It is becoming a controlled corridor where escorts, insurance, and state backing decide who moves and on what terms. Trump seems quite content to let Israel move fast and hit hard, yet when it comes to a full U.S. Navy effort to restore normal freedom of navigation in Hormuz, he is in no visible hurry. That makes strategic sense. America can live without the Strait far more easily than the Gulf states, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and India can. WTI is still below $100; Brent briefly jumped above $119 before settling lower; the real pain is falling hardest on the import-dependent world, with Middle Eastern benchmark grades spiking far above the U.S. marker. Trump may be calculating that a period of controlled pain clarifies who actually needs the route reopened, and who is willing to help pay, insure, escort, or otherwise shoulder the burden.

That helps explain the slow-walk. The Gulf monarchies depend on Hormuz, but none has built the sort of navy that can reliably escort the world’s energy lifeline on its own. Europe has issued statements and promised support for maritime security, but so far rhetoric has outrun steel. India has already done what serious states do, escorting its own tankers and now moving additional warships toward the Gulf of Oman. Japan is under heavier pressure because it needs Gulf energy badly, but its constitution still limits how far it can go, even if there are legal workarounds for protective maritime missions. Estonia, for its part, is not in the fight yet, but it has at least signaled willingness to discuss participation, which is more than can be said for some larger allies. So Konrad may be onto something: perhaps the point of delay is not inability, but sorting. Who is a freeloader, who is useful, and who is finally ready to act once the bill comes due.

Now back to Israel. Perhaps the most striking development this week is not just the bombing itself, but the way the kill chain seems to be tightening. There are credible reports that informants inside Iran have been passing targeting information on Basij and IRGC checkpoints to Israel. That is a very twenty-first-century kind of war: citizens with phones, encrypted channels, and a foreign intelligence service on the other end turning local knowledge into airstrikes. Even with cloud cover over Tehran and Bandar Abbas complicating optical surveillance and quick bomb-damage assessment, Israel’s drone and real-time intelligence picture still looks formidable. That is the real significance of Israel’s drone use. Not that drones are in the sky, everyone has drones now, but that Israel seems able to compress the time between spotting a mobile target and destroying it. That is how you kill launcher teams, UAV cells, and Basij meetings before they scatter.

Where is this going? Israel still needs time, time to keep decapitating the regime, time to keep tearing up its instruments of repression, time to let fear and confusion do the work that bombs alone cannot. How long will that take? Who knows. So my guess is that Trump is in no rush. Let the market panic. Let allies reveal themselves. Let the oil-addicted world remember who actually keeps sea lanes open. Then, when the regime starts to fold, take Kharg Island, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and call it, more or less, the Strait of America.

Yehuda Hausman is author of Said the Judean: Prophecy, Politics, & Faith After October 7th. He is a writer, rabbi, researcher.

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