CENTCOM Schedules 30 Apr Briefing on Three-Pronged Iran Strike Options

Washington has played this card before: in April 1988’s Operation Praying Mantis the U.S. struck Iranian naval assets to secure Gulf shipping, and in 1956 Britain and France tried (and failed) to hold the Suez choke-point. Today’s briefing fits that lineage of maritime leverage yet occurs under the 1973 War Powers Act, whose 60-day clock expires tomorrow—echoes of President Johnson’s legally murky 1968 Vietnam escalations. Structurally, the event underscores a century-long trend: nuclear issues are increasingly managed not through treaties but through coercive strikes and blockades, while energy chokepoints remain the soft underbelly of global markets. Whether Trump green-lights action or not, the mere preparation normalises pre-emptive use of force to compel negotiations; on a 100-year horizon, that signals a drift away from post-1945 norms of civilian-infrastructure immunity and toward great-power friction over dwindling hydrocarbon corridors.