“More than a month into the war with Iran, President Trump now faces the most consequential decision of his presidency: whether to deploy U.S. ground forces on Iranian territory. For now, the debate about the president's choice to enter the war is irrelevant. The question before us is what future course best serves America's long-term interests. The answer isn't obvious.
This matter calls for sober deliberation with a minimum of partisanship and recrimination. Patriotic cheerleading is worse than useless. So is defeatism, as well as seat-of-the-pants policymaking. We need a cool-headed assessment of our options and the Iranians' possible responses. We must accept both risks and uncertainty. Our assumptions about how Iran will respond to what we do may be flawed.
Epistemological humility is essential. Although many experts believe that the Iranian regime isn't on the brink of collapse, they may be wrong. Perhaps intensifying military pressure on Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will thin forces that the regime needs to quell domestic opposition, creating the conditions for a renewed popular uprising. We must play the odds, but we can't know for sure what will happen.
The immediate problem is Iran's seizure of the Strait of Hormuz, enabling the Iranians to block the ships of countries they view as hostile and to impose transit fees on others. President Trump has said that the U.S. Navy will accompany tankers through the strait if necessary, but doing this in combat conditions is a high-risk venture made more difficult by the large reduction in the number of the U.S. Navy's surface ships since the end of the Cold War. More than 20 countries have said they are ready to help "ensure safe passage through the strait," but many of them will hesitate to enter an active war zone. Other naval options, such as a selective blockage of Iranian imports, would ratchet up pressure on Iran to reopen the strait but probably wouldn't yield quick results.
The difficulty of reopening the strait and bringing the war to a timely conclusion through naval and air power alone has prompted the White House to consider using ground forces. Iran's Kharg Island, which has been on Mr. Trump's radar since the 1980s, has emerged as a tempting target. Seizing it would allow the U.S. to control -- even turn off -- Iran's oil exports, increasing pressure on Iran to reopen the strait.
But a recent detailed analysis by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, well-known for its hawkish stance on Iran, argues that taking the island, which the U.S. could do relatively quickly, may be a "trap of America's own making." Our forces would be in range of Iranian multiple launch rocket systems, artillery firing rocket-assisted projectiles, and potentially the sort of Iranian drones that Russia has deployed to deadly effect in Ukraine. Protecting U.S. forces would require diverting military assets from other high-priority missions in the Iran conflict theater.
The Kharg Island mission might make sense if it strikes a decisive blow that shortens the war and secures America's strategic interest. But the FDD analysis concludes that it won't, because the revenue Iran generates from oil sales "is not a major determinant of the conflict's outcome in the near-to-medium term."
As the Journal reports, Mr. Trump is considering a declaration of victory soon and a drawdown of American forces. But no such declaration will be credible as long as Iran remains in effective control of the strait. Seizing Kharg Island probably won't be enough to break Iran's grip on the waterway. If not, retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark argues in an op-ed for USA Today, a much larger operation would be necessary, seizing multiple islands in the strait and dealing with a range of Iranian threats from the shoreline. Protecting shipping, Gen. Clark concludes, means controlling the "whole shoreline, its people and the airspace above it." Even with the ground forces now on their way to the region, we probably wouldn't have enough troops to do this. It would still take more.
The prospects for negotiations reopening the strait and ending the war are dismal, and there is no guarantee that force can accomplish what diplomacy cannot. The U.S. is in no position, militarily or politically, to mount the kind of all-out invasion of Iran that brought down Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But anything less will probably allow the Iranian regime to survive, which it will trumpet as a victory against the Great Satan.
Mr. Trump faces difficult choices. If the war ends with Iran still in control of the strait, the U.S. will have suffered a strategic defeat. But if the limited ground operations that the president is now considering don't succeed, he may well have to choose between this defeat and escalation, which could lead to something even worse.” [1]
1. Politics & Ideas: America Faces Tough Choices in Iran. Galston, William A. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 01 Apr 2026: A13.
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