The New York Times:

By Katrin Bennhold

As President Trump warns that “we have a lot of very big, very powerful ships sailing to Iran right now,” our national security correspondent David E. Sanger breaks down what to know.

Iran is not Venezuela

If you take President Trump at his word, the clock is ticking on military action against Iran.

Trump has effectively given the Iranian authorities an ultimatum. He has demanded that Iran end its nuclear program, stop producing missiles that can reach Israel and cease all support to armed proxies in the region — basically give up all its leverage. It’s a long shot.

And last week, he detailed what would happen if Iran did not comply. “A massive Armada is heading to Iran,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Like with Venezuela, it is, ready, willing, and able to rapidly fulfill its mission, with speed and violence, if necessary.”

Trump is actively making a comparison to Venezuela. The United States amassed forces just off Venezuela’s coast as part of a pressure campaign against the country’s leader. When he refused, the U.S. attacked and captured him in a bold overnight raid.

But, as my colleagues report, Iran’s ability to strike Israeli cities and destabilize the wider Middle East makes it a far more dangerous adversary than Venezuela. Which is why, for all his bluster, Trump and his top aides are still weighing whether to make good on the threats of military action.

“The president is using Venezuela to try to intimidate the Iranians, but without a clear objective,” my colleague David Sanger in Washington told me. “The playbook is familiar. But the target is very, very different.” 

Threatening all-out war

The analogy with Venezuela is tempting.

Iran, like Venezuela, is run by a brutal authoritarian government and has been crippled by years of sanctions. It defines itself in opposition to the United States, relying on U.S. rivals like China and Russia to circumvent trade restrictions.

And it’s weak domestically, as mass protests revealed in January. Dozens of Iranians have told my colleague Erika Solomon, our Iran bureau chief, that they hope Trump will make good on his promise to send help and remove the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

But Iran has a lot of capacity to inflict damage in ways that Venezuela does not.

Tehran looks militarily weak at the moment. The Assad regime in Syria has fallen. Other regional allies, like Hamas and Hezbollah, have been decimated. And bombardments by Israel and the U.S. last June damaged Iran’s ballistic missile production lines and buried much of its nuclear stockpile.

But Erika told me that this weakness is part of the reason the Iranian leadership is so determined to strike back. You can read her analysis here.

“This time it’s about survival,” Erika told me. “They have signaled that if the U.S. strikes them, they will do what they can to make this an all-out war in the region.”

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