US plan doesn’t include a war. Military preparedness is part of the plan and it stems from the nature of the regime they are dealing with.

The plan is to choke the regime to compliance. Regime change is a presumed side-effect to the compliance- carried out by the Iranian people. This is purely a ‘business’ plan. From the words of Pompeo -not Trump- one can suspect a military support to the Iranian people upheaval down the road. But this is very much dependant to the US interior politics and to the turn of events in this ‘presumed side-effect’.

So the issue of how to handle the military actions -perfectly expected from Islamic regime behaviour- is measured by how it can support the plan. Proving military superiority of the US is never an issue and never has been in the past forty years. The issue is how it can help the plan.

In the early days that Trump came to the WH, he specifically assigned a task-force to come-up with a plan vis-a-vis Iran. If I’m not mistaken Mike Pompeo was in charge of that task-force. What we saw thereafter, from exiting the nuke deal to scheduled sanctions are all part of a plan that was initially put together in early days of Trump presidency.

Trump -like Tucker- is an isolationist at heart. ‘Great’ America he envisions is the America of before WWII. When the companies and businesses were named after their founders, when they were family business and not corporates with no identity. After all, this is where he is coming from.

Beside military capability of Islamic regime to shot down a drone in a such altitude, there was nothing surprising to that event. I thought the best retaliation would be to send the bill of a new drone to the regime! Trump aborted a retaliation strike that I suspect in itself would be very limited. Not long ago (a week or so) Trump said he is considering military action as the absolute last option ‘because war kills people’. He used the same logic to abort the strike. I do think that he sincerely believes it.

But I also think that it was simply not helping his plan. It was adding some complication to a situation that was going his way anyway. Europe is distancing itself from its stance regarding the sanctions, and China and Japan are getting more concerned about the oil price, clearly not blaming the US for it.

The head of IRGC just claimed that they could shoot a plane with 30 passengers at the same time the drone was flying but they chose not to! He didn’t say if that plane also crossed their ‘red line’ and if it did what stopped them shooting it! But in an islamic way, this is a sign of matching the compassion expressed by Trump.

Now going back to the choking process!