Unlike North Korea, the Iranian regime does not have a brace of nuclear warheads with which to keep America at bay. But it has an escalatory power that was unavailable to Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi in their fateful conflicts with the United States. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the resulting damage to global energy markets, is the first great escalatory move. The threat to go all out to destroy the larger infrastructure of the Persian Gulf, from refineries to desalinization plants, is the second — usable only in extremis, as an act of murder-suicide, but still a potent threat from a regime facing existential defeat.