Come 8 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, President Donald Trump will face a choice: enforce his deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, or allow it to pass.

America’s joined strategic and moral interests demand that Trump choose the latter option.

The problem is that Iran is not going to bend to Trump’s demand, issued Sunday, that it reopen the strait or suffer the destruction of its power plants and bridges. The regime recognizes that the strait’s closure is its key means of leverage with which to push Trump into a diplomatic resolution that favors its interests. Trump rightly doesn’t want to yield to that pressure, instead seeking ways to put so much U.S. pressure on Iran that it is forced to back down and open the strait.

But bombing power plants, bridges, and other civil infrastructure isn’t the way to accomplish that task. Indeed, such action risks only reinforcing the Iranian regime’s perception that this is an existential struggle in which it faces a binary choice between escalation and betraying God. And while the scaled destruction of Iranian infrastructure would obviously damage........

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