AS is so often the case with Donald Trump’s administration, the messages are contradictory. On the one hand, the president says the US is considering “winding down” its war in Iran.
On the other, US military officials are making detailed preparations for the possibility of deploying ground troops into the Islamic Republic and thousands more American marines are now on their way, pointing to the potential for further escalation of the conflict and a new phase of combat.
Then there is the thorny issue of the crucial Strait of Hormuz. For a time, Trump was at pains to point out that US allies in Europe and Asia should join a maritime coalition to help secure access and passage to shipping that passes through the Strait.
Then, last Tuesday, in a post on his Truth Social platform, he insisted this was no longer needed. “In fact,” he wrote, “we do not need the help of anyone!”
In years to come, when this war is spoken about by historians and others, it will be the chaotic and muddled nature of the US prosecution of this Middle East catastrophe that many will remember and cite.
For the moment though, far from “winding down”, what is currently happening say some regional analysts, is a temporary tapering off before another spasm of violence.
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Set against this, meanwhile, there is the massive economic fallout. As Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA), recently warned, the Iran war now represents “the greatest global energy security threat in history”.
Last week, the IEA announced the release of 400 million barrels of oil and refined products from global stockpiles to ease shortages around the world.
But in an interview with the Financial Times (FT), Birol maintained that “the single most important action is the resumption of transits through the Strait of Hormuz”.
Already the pressing need to return open passage through the Strait is starting to draw in global powers, as disruptions to shipping and energy flows raise concerns about wider economic impact.
European nations and Japan have said they are ready to support efforts to improve security in the Strait. In a joint statement, countries including Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan condemned attacks on commercial vessels and said they were prepared to “contribute to appropriate efforts” to help ensure safe passage through the waterway and support stability in global energy markets.
The statement, however, was short of actual details on how they would do so or the extent to which all these nations would be willing to commit resources. For the moment, the conflict is “metastasising” warn some regional observers, among them David Ignatius columnist at The Washington Post.
“Unwinding this conflict will be much harder than starting it was. Declaring ‘victory’ and walking away would leave the region in dangerous disarray. To truly end the crisis, Trump will have to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and put limits on Iran’s ragged new leadership,” noted Ignatius recently in an article for Foreign Policy magazine.
“He can achieve these goals through coercion, or diplomacy, or a combination of the two. But he must choose a strategy and implement it,” Ignatius concluded.
Which brings us back to the Pentagon’s announcement that the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), which consists of about 2200 marines, will now sail from California, becoming the second MEU ordered to the Middle East in the past week.
The US already has about 50,000 troops in the region. With the additional marines and sailors, the figure will be closer to 60,000.
The 31st MEU, with another 2200 marines, is en route to the Middle East from Japan and is expected to arrive in about a week.
Trained specifically, as MEUs are for fast amphibious raids on land, this has only further fuelled speculation that Trump now has his eyes set on seizing Kharg Island, the vital Iranian oil export hub, or small islands in the Strait of Hormuz to secure the strategic waterway.
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For decades, Trump has been fixated on Kharg Island, which he calls Iran’s “crown jewel”, a rocky speck where 90% of Iran’s oil exports are loaded on to tankers.
Back in 1998, during his Art Of The Deal book tour, Trump himself suggested seizing Kharg, saying that if he were president, he would “do a number” on it.
Earlier this month, Trump got his chance when America bombed dozens of military targets there, hitting storage depots for missiles and naval mines, but spared its oil facilities.
In the wake of the strikes, leading Iran hawks urged Trump to finish the job. “Mr president: take Kharg Island (and) this war is over!” exhorted Lindsey Graham, Republican senator for South Carolina.
It’s reported too that fellow Republican, Texas Congressman Pete Sessions is said to have floated the idea that seizing Kharg Island is the perfect mission for the MEU now sailing toward the region.
Writing recently for the US-based online magazine Responsible Statecraft (RS), Harrison Mann, a former US military intelligence official, detailed how Kharg also came back on the radar after Michael Rubin, a scholar at the conservative think tank, American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and former Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority official, said taking Kharg was a ”no-brainer.”
Rubin then went on to pitch his idea to White House officials, according to Mann, who once worked at the
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) before resigning ostensibly over US support for Israel’s war in Gaza and the harm caused to Palestinians.
“If we apply some basic military planning to Rubin’s pitch, it would go like this,” explained Mann in an RS article.
“US troops take over the Island via airborne or heliborne insertion, or even amphibious assault. With the Iranian regime’s oil held hostage by Trump and its military ‘unable to make payroll’, it will have no choice but to come to the table to negotiate its capitulation.”
In other words, the idea would be to use the island’s seizure as leverage. For example, if the Gulf states cannot export their oil, neither can Iran, but as The Economist magazine noted, the chances are that oil prices would jump further, both from the loss of supply (Iran ships around one million barrels a day to China) and the prospect of a longer war.
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Few analysts doubt that America is more than capable of capturing Kharg Island, but if the regime still has the capacity to respond – which many believe it has – then American marines would have to withstand a potential barrage of missiles and drones.
In his own analysis, Mann said that given the size of the island – five miles long – as well as its substantial civilian population, the lack of surprise in the attack and need to hold it indefinitely, the US would need thousands of troops for the mission.
“For the troops unlucky enough to receive orders to take Kharg, the operation would land somewhere between a suicide mission and a self-imposed hostage crisis,” warned Mann.
Already, Operation Epic Fury is piling the pressure on America’s overstretched armed forces, leaving them less prepared for a conflict in Asia.
According to analysis by the Payne Institute for Public Policy in Colorado, America probably used just over 5000 munitions of different sorts in the first four days of the war, and 11,000 or so in the first 16 days. That would make Epic Fury “the most intensive opening air campaign in modern history”, the Institute notes, surpassing the first three days of Nato’s bombing of Libya in 2011.
But even with all these risks, Trump might well take the gamble of a “boots on the ground” campaign, and the deployment of the MEUs certainly suggests that could well be Washington’s next move.
“Kharg is a pitch tailor-made for Trump: A daring made-for-TV assault to ‘take the oil’ combines Trump’s penchants for military spectacle and seizing natural resources, most recently on display in Venezuela,” said Mann.
“Most importantly, unlike other proposals including raiding nuclear sites, Kharg supposedly promises the total victory Trump expected when he started this war. All he has to do is take an island smaller than Manhattan south of Trump Tower,” added Mann, who currently serves as associate director for policy and campaigns at Win Without War.
Meanwhile, for its part, Iran continues an escalation of its own. Even with many of its leaders already killed, those that replaced them continue to believe that fighting back hard will ultimately protect the country from the US and Israel by teaching both states that striking the Islamic Republic has meaningful consequences.
Tehran may also be banking on the fact that should they survive the war, it will shore up the regime at home.
Much to the surprise of many – not least in Washington – Iran has maintained remarkable cohesion since the attacks started, with its command-and-control system seemingly still intact, albeit severely eroded.
That much was admitted by America’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and other top Trump administration officials who testified last week at a congressional hearing for more than two hours about worldwide threats to the US.
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“The IC (intelligence community) assesses the regime in Iran appears to be intact but largely degraded due to attacks on its leadership and military capabilities,” confirmed Gabbard.
If this proves an accurate assessment, then some observers believe that a battered regime may prefer a ceasefire to internal chaos and dysfunction.
A few days ago, Israeli sources gave The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) details suggesting that this moment may be approaching because of relentless decapitation strikes.
“A sense of disorder is starting to take hold” in Tehran, the WSJ reported last Wednesday. But others remain sceptical of such an Israeli take, seeing it as part of a deliberate messaging campaign aimed at trying to stir up opposition to the regime inside Iran.
As a Reuters news agency report yesterday pointed out, as Trump ends the third week of the war, he does so confronting a crisis that seems to be slipping out of his hands.
Far from having anything remotely resembling a clear exit strategy, there is a growing feeling that the Kharg Island gambit is the most likely among Trump’s few dwindling options.
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It goes without saying too that such a move carries huge risks both for his presidential legacy and his party’s political prospects as Republicans scramble to defend narrow majorities in Congress in the November midterm elections.
“Trump has built himself a box called the Iran war, and he can’t figure out how to get out of it,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator for Republican and Democratic administrations. “That’s his biggest source of frustration,” Miller told Reuters.
It’s a view also echoed by an editorial leader in The Economist a few days ago that highlighted how the war has the capacity to bring Trump’s second term “crashing to earth”.
“The reason is that the fight against Iran diminishes Trump’s three political superpowers: his ability to impose his own reality on the world, his remorseless use of leverage and his dominion over the Republican Party.
“Even without Iran, the potency of these Trumpian strengths was likely to wane after the midterm elections. Wars accelerate change.” The Economist argued.
For now, the US president remains boxed in, and it’s unlikely the Americans will relent militarily while the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked. Trump knows too that his Gulf allies, who have borne the brunt of his rash decision to go to war with Iran, will now want to see any threat from Tehran got rid of once and for all.
In the coming days what happens once the US Marine Expeditionary Forces are in position will prove telling. Should those marine boots step on to Iranian soil, then the war moves into a new phase, and a perilous sequel to the invasion of Iraq becomes a nightmarish reality.
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