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Ultimately this will be resolved when President Trump has had enough of it, grown bored of it or realises it's going to play very badly in US polling and is damaging the US economy much more than he had expected. Now, all those conditions are starting to appear, and I imagine the President and his staff are weighing up the options. They've got two main options. They can either go big, and they're preparing for that in terms of invading, at least in a limited way, parts of Iranian territory. In my opinion, that would be a very bad idea. That would be taking us into even more uncertain territory than we are at the moment. And you know, memories are fresh of what happened after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. So we don't want to go back there. On the other option, which I would hope there are enough promising signs... That he may be interested in taking would be to seek an off-ramp and to try and declare victory. Of course, the Iranians will also say they've won because they've achieved their main objective. They're still in power."

On the negative side, there is a grain of truth, with the Royal Navy being smaller than it has been in hundreds of years,” said professor Kevin Rowlands, editor of the Royal United Services Institute Journal. “On the positive side, the Royal Navy would say that it’s entering its first period of growth since World War II, with more ships set to be built than in decades.”