Has TACO Tuesday Finally Come to Iran?

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, May 06, 2026

 

For weeks, the default assumption among the president’s critics was that he would find some way to wiggle out of the war he ignited in the Middle East. And yet, “any minute now” stretched on for weeks as the president prosecuted, first, the kinetic phase of the conflict and, later, a throttling strategy that coupled economic restrictions and threats against sanctions violators with a naval blockade. All the while, Donald Trump and his administration projected unanticipated (and, too often, unrecognized) steadfastness in pursuit of their objective in the war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Until yesterday.

 

Since the outbreak of the cease-fire at the beginning of April, we’ve had stasis in the Strait of Hormuz. But then, on Sunday, a flurry of activity broke the unstable equilibrium. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps boats and shore-based missile crews fired on civilian vessels. U.S. cruise-missile destroyers transited the strait, where they were fired on by Iranian forces. Unsuccessful in their attacks, Iranian field commanders did what they had done during Operation Epic Fury: They fired missiles, rockets, and drones at their Gulf neighbors, targeting Oman and the UAE and striking a crucial Emerati oil-distribution hub.

 

The outbreak of hostilities accompanied the administration’s announcement that it would begin using force to reopen the strait to commerce. The Iranians’ reaction to the revelation that the regime’s last point of leverage over the West would be taken from them was, surely, understandable given its gravity. And the administration’s commitment to the operation, code-named Project Freedom, was clear.

 

On Tuesday, the White House dispatched a variety of administration principals to roll out Project Freedom, explaining its goals in granular detail and educating the public on the moral and strategic rationales that inspired it.

 

“Two U.S. commercial ships, along with American destroyers, have already transited the strait, showing the lane is clear,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a press conference in which he elaborated on the “gift” that America was giving to the world: “a powerful red, white, and blue dome over the strait.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Dan Caine, concurred. “It feels like Iran is grasping at straws,” the chairman said of a regime that he described as being “led by the IRGC.” Indeed, the regime was, in Caine’s view, “struggling to maintain control down echelon.”

 

Later, the White House dispatched Secretary of State Marco Rubio to hold a lengthy press briefing explaining the threat that Project Freedom was designed to mitigate. Rubio explained that Iran’s “criminal and desperate” actions had left more than 23,000 mariners stranded in open water. They needed to be rescued, and the United States was the lone naval power on earth that could do it. In addition, the operation would serve as “the first step to reopening the strait,” Rubio declared — an enterprise that would bring Iran’s act of “economic arson to a close.”

 

This whole thing sure sounded pretty important, both from a humanitarian and militarily strategic perspective. And why wouldn’t it be? America’s war aims, its role as the world’s only guarantee of free maritime commerce, and, of course, its prestige are on the line. But then, out of the blue and following a whole-of-administration effort to drum up support for Project Freedom, Trump called it off:

 

 

There has been plenty of reporting on the contours of a potential deal that could emerge from this last-minute breakthrough. As with past reports about previous potential breakthroughs that never materialized, we should take this with a grain of salt. The reporting about these potential off-ramps often entertain the notion that Trump would be satisfied if the Iranians agreed to an Obama-style moratorium on the enrichment of fissile material on its soil in exchange for sanctions relief. But until the president himself says he would abandon his oft-stated objective of foreclosing on Iran’s ability to develop weapons-grade uranium or plutonium, skepticism is warranted.

 

The president’s behavior, however, should also give observers pause. The Iranian regime violated the cease-fire. It shot dozens of missiles, drones, and other assets at not just America’s Gulf-region partners but also U.S. flagged vessels and Navy ships. Does that not merit a response? What precedents would it set if Trump did nothing?

 

Encouragingly, some reporting indicates that Iran’s erratic conduct is an outgrowth of precisely the sort of intra-elite tensions within the regime that the United States wants to cultivate. As Israeli reporter Amit Sigal explains, those tensions are a desirable result of the intense pressure the U.S.-led blockade and the financial warfare around it are having on internal Iranian thinking:

 

Right now, Iran has 184 million barrels of oil sitting uselessly on the water. Roughly 60 million of those barrels are physically trapped inside the blockade zone across the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. The other 124 million are anchored near China, but buyers are too terrified of secondary U.S. sanctions to touch them. Between stalled oil and frozen petrochemical exports, the blockade is draining the regime of an estimated $400 million to $500 million every single day.

 

“Once Iran’s onshore and floating storage tanks reach 100 percent capacity,” Sigal wrote, Iran would have to shutter its wells, risking their viability and sacrificing billions per day. And the money is running out. “Iran currently has a surplus of men with guns and a deficit of loyalty. The only things bridging that gap are fear and cash, and when the latter runs out, the former loses its edge.”

 

But President Trump is clearly also under pressure. That strain was almost certainly the impetus for Project Freedom in the first place, and it very well may be the logic that led him to abort the initiative.

 

It is hard to envision any memorandum of understanding with the Islamic Republic that would, at this stage, give the United States what it needs to secure an unalloyed victory in its war against Iran. The Strait of Hormuz cannot be reopened as a result of the Islamic Republic’s voluntary generosity. Anything short of stripping Iran of its leverage all but guarantees that another revanchist power, like China, would attempt to use force to close another contested waterway. And while the president appears committed to getting Iran to hand over its highly enriched uranium stockpiles, there’s little that Iran can do with those (currently inaccessible) nuclear materials if it lacks the elaborate and expensive facilities needed to refine and enrich them.

 

If the president wants his critics and adversaries — at home and abroad — to concede that they are vanquished, undone, and forever discredited, he’ll be waiting a long time. But the administration can secure for itself a set of empirically observable conditions that resemble victory so closely that only the most blinkered could dismiss them. He’s close, but he’s not there yet.

 

“I think it’s got a very good chance of ending,” the president told PBS News on Tuesday, “and if it doesn’t end, we have to go back to bombing the hell out of them.” Trump was wise to keep his options open. If he remains committed to victory in this war, he should continue to press his advantage.