The Trump strikes were the right call, but the ayatollahs get a vote too.

Over the weekend, there was widespread speculation that the Iranian regime will seek to calibrate its response to the U.S. airstrikes last Friday in a way that would allow it to maintain face and demonstrate resolve, but while avoiding a massive American counterstrike.

But is this correct? Is it even possible?

When discussing the “known unknowns” of Iran’s response to the U.S. strikes, there are three that are generally up for consideration. First, Iran could close the Straits of Hormuz to commercial shipping, which would keep something like one out of every three barrels of seaborne oil shipments from reaching world markets. Second, Iran could attack — either directly or via its proxies — U.S. military forces and bases in the Middle East: in Iraq, in Syria, and in the Gulf. Third, Iran could activate sleeper terrorist cells in the West to create mayhem. The likeliest targets would be those in the United States and Britain, and against Jewish institutions and individuals worldwide.

(There are also the “unknown unknowns,” which by definition, we wouldn’t be able to predict in advance.)

If Donald Trump stands by his very clear statement Friday night that “ANY RETALIATION BY IRAN AGAINST THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL BE MET WITH FORCE FAR GREATER THAN WHAT WAS WITNESSED,” it’s hard to see what room Iran has to both save face by responding to the U.S. strikes and avoid a massive U.S. retort.

Let’s take Iran’s three options one by one.

On Sunday, the Iranian parliament moved to close the Straits of Hormuz, which connect the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea and the wider Indian Ocean. That vote was not binding on the government of Ayatollah Khamenei, but it’s likely a good barometer of where the political sentiment is among the Iranian ruling class. The United States and Britain have been repeatedly warning the Iranians against attempting to close the strait or mine its narrow waterways. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has even appealed to the Chinese government in Beijing to exert pressure on the Iranians in this matter.

But no matter our warnings, the Iranians probably could close the strait if they wanted to, at least for a time. They need not physically control the whole of the area. They could release thousands of sea mines, forcing allied navies to undergo the laborious process of sweeping and clearing the sea lanes. To impose costs on us, and the world economy, they need only make the passage untenable for commercial shipping, much as the Houthi rebels in Yemen forced most freighters and tankers to avoid the Bab-el-Mandeb route to the Suez Canal and instead take the long way around the Cape of Good Hope. CNBC is already reporting that oil tankers are changing course to avoid the Strait of Hormuz.

At President Trump’s direction, the United States hit the Houthis for seven intensive weeks between March and May 2025 in an effort to get them to stop threatening Western shipping. There’s no question that the Iranians could sustain at least as much damage as the Houthis, if not more, and over a similar period of time, if not more. I don’t doubt that the U.S. Navy and Air Force could force the Iranians to relent, but no one should expect that such a campaign would be quick and easy if the Iranians were determined to resist.

With regard to strikes on U.S. forces and facilities across the Middle East, the Pentagon saw this as enough of a threat that we evacuated a significant portion of the staff from the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and other bases within range of Iranian missiles or Iranian proxies. In Qatar, just across the Persian Gulf from Iran, the U.S. withdrew dozens of aircraft from the Al Udeid airbase, a major hub for American military air power in the region. From the Iranian point of view, an attack on any American facility brings major risks. The January 8, 2020, Iranian ballistic missile attack on U.S. forces at Al-Asad airbase in Iraq, which followed Donald Trump’s elimination of Qasem Soleimani, avoided a major U.S. response because no Americans were killed (though it was later revealed that dozens of Americans were seriously hurt with traumatic brain injuries). But there’d be no way for Iran to ensure such a bloodless result again, even if it wanted one.

Finally, the danger to soft targets in the West is very high. NBC News has reported that the Iranian government sent a message to President Trump through an intermediary while he attended G-7 meetings in Canada last week that any U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities would elicit terror attacks in the United States. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have sounded the alarm.

President Trump was right to order the strikes on the Iranian nuclear program, the degrading of which is wholly in the U.S. interest. The strikes also had the salutary effect of reestablishing a degree of American deterrence against bad actors worldwide. It goes too far, as some talking heads have declared, to say that the strikes have guaranteed that Communist China will not attempt an invasion of Taiwan while Donald Trump is president. But there’s no question in my mind that America looks stronger today than it did during the years of Joe Biden’s sclerotic presidency.

But Trump’s reestablished paradigm of strength and deterrence will crumble if he allows Iran to save face, hit American targets, and walk away unscathed. There are dangerous days ahead. It is an entirely rational assumption that Iran will want to find a way to deescalate this situation and find a way to end a war that it is manifestly losing. But we should not count on the Iranians to be entirely rational here. In the first place, the Iranians have the experience of 25 years of American warmaking to look back on. They believe fundamentally that they can outlast the decadent Western powers. And we should not dismiss the role of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Millenarian and apocalyptic theology at times such as these. Ali Khamenei was a younger man when he helped lead his country into the Iran-Iraq War, a bloody struggle that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and lasted most of a decade. Is it impossible to think that he might view another such conflict as the lesser of two evils if the alternative is a humiliating surrender to the Great and Little Satans?

The hope, and the predictions, that the United States could bomb Fordow, destroy the Iranian nuclear program, and then wash her hands of this matter were never very likely to prove correct. In this war, as in all wars, the enemy gets a vote too.

The best course to contain the fallout from the strikes is what it always is: Display American strength and resolution, and defend ourselves, our allies, and our interests, with decisive military action if necessary. That’s the best way to get our enemies to back down.