Fascinating!-----How Trump's 'anaconda' tactics put the squeeze on Iran and China

In the mid-19th century, Scott was America’s preeminent military mind, the architect of victory in the Mexican War and the “Grand Old Man of the Army.” - Glenn H. Reynolds

With his blockade of Iran, though, maybe we should start comparing him to Gen. Winfield Scott...

• As the Civil War loomed, he developed a plan to defeat the Confederacy with the smallest number of casualties possible.
• He called it the Anaconda Plan — and like its namesake it was about applying a squeeze, and squeezing hard, until its object was squeezed to death.

Rather than winning a single decisive battle or a series of major confrontations, Scott wanted to cut the Confederacy in two by seizing control of the Mississippi River, while choking off the South’s foreign trade — upon which it was enormously dependent for both money and materiel — with a naval blockade of its Atlantic and Gulf ports...