Retired 4-star Gen. Jack Keane weighs U.S. military options against Iran as the nation faces economic collapse and analyzes the Supreme Leader’s threats regarding the Strait of Hormuz.

BRIAN KILMEADE, FOX NEWS: President Trump praised the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz after Iran’s supreme leader escalated tensions with new threats, saying, quote, those foreigners from thousands of kilometers away who are greedily carrying out transgressions in the Persian Gulf and Sea of Oman have no place here except at the bottom of the waters. Iran will put an end to the hostile enemy’s exploitation of the Strait of Hormuz. This is CENTCOM Briefed. President Trump on the Strait yesterday and his military options. Retired four-star general, Fox News senior strategic analyst, chairman of the Institute of Study Award, General Jack Keane joins us now. General, first off, the supreme leader not knuckling under, warning us that our Navy’s going to end up on the bottom of the sea. What does that do to things? RET. GEN. JACK KEANE: Well, they’re always full of bluster. I mean, their rhetoric is considerably much stronger than what they’re able to produce in reality in terms of military terms. I mean, that’s what this is. It’s for our own domestic population, you know, to show that they’re still in charge here. They’re standing up to the powers of Israel and the United States, and also, obviously, international consumption. I mean, the administration sees right through that. KILMEADE: So, let’s talk about what the president got yesterday, a briefing of options that he could take out if we resume the fighting in Iran, which I think seems to be the path we’re on. What could you tell me about those options? KEANE: Well, first of all, I mean, where are we right now, you know, so the American people understand? We’ve been three-plus weeks into an attempt to negotiate after the Iranians shut down the straits. The administration believed that there would be an opportunity here for negotiations. I think the Iranians put some feelers out there to convince our negotiators that there clearly was some realistic possibilities here. And none of that turned out to be the case, because the hardliners in charge are not about to present to President Trump a deal that he’s willing to accept. That’s number one. Number two, he’s not going to make a bad deal himself. So, we have a stalemate here. They own the Straits of Hormuz, and we have shut down all their exports with the blockade. So we could continue that, because the blockade is definitely effective. And we can make a huge list of everything that’s happening to the Iranians in terms of the economic peril and the suffering that’s about to take place. But you have to, again, recognize, who are we really dealing with here? The guys running the regime, all they care about is staying in power. They don’t care about their people. They’ve demonstrated that time and time again, in terms of their economic peril, that they put them in themselves, and also killing them, to make certain they stay in power. So they, in their minds, can outlast us, in the sense that political pressure, getting closer to the midterms, economic pressure with gas prices on the administration. They believe, even though we have the economic blockade, at some point, we will end the war, stop everything, or make a deal with them that meets some of their objectives. The other alternative was to recognize that they are steadfast in that, and they will certainly don’t care about their people’s suffering. The people that think this is going to cause a collapse and they’re going to make a deal, I think they’re underestimating who these guys really are. So the reality is, then what else are our options? Well, I think option one is return and finish what we started. We spent three weeks here trying to work something out with these guys. We have assigned objectives to the CENTCOM, so does Israel. We are two weeks short of accomplishing that. Let’s go finish that once and for all, complete that mission that we’ve given to them. And we can go through a list of targets, but there’s leadership targets out there, there’s ballistic missiles out there, there’s the remnants of the nuclear program that’s out there, there’s drone storage that’s out there, and energy infrastructure, et cetera. There’s plenty of targets that we have assigned that we want to finish. And we have twice the amount of combat power to do that from when we started. And the Israelis are flush with munitions. Also, what do we do about the Straits of Hormuz? We can’t leave them in Iranians’ hands. They believe now they own it. We have to militarily force that to be cleared and secured and open. And we have the military capability to do that. Another option, what do we do about Karg Island? Karg Island is blocked right now by our blockade. An option, when we finish military operations, or maybe even start with military operations, it’s an option the president has, certainly, and likely was discussed. We could destroy it. And that would force an eventual economic collapse of the regime. There’s no doubt about that. They don’t have much alternatives, because literally 80 percent of their revenue comes from that distribution of oil itself right out of that one place. So those military options went through discussions last week, and the president has those decisions to make. I do think we’ll probably move on and do something here other than the blockade, because the blockade in and of itself I don’t believe is going to force any concessions out of these people given who they really are.

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