By Adam Cancryn, Zachary Cohen, Alayna Treene, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump is weighing several options for dramatically escalating the war against Iran should his latest push for diplomacy fail.
None of them are ideal.
While the military campaign has heavily focused on bombing the country so far, Pentagon officials preparing for a next phase of war have drawn up scenarios for deploying troops to seize various targets within Iran, according to more than half a dozen people familiar with the discussions.
Yet not only would those scenarios risk heavy casualties, there’s also little guarantee they would successfully end the conflict.
The internal game-planning has taken on growing importance as Trump plots the next stage of his Middle East campaign — and as economic and political pressure builds on him to find a decisive way to end the war.
Yet even as he orders thousands more soldiers to the region, Trump has waffled on whether to further intensify the conflict, wary that a misstep now would turn the war into an increasingly bloody and prolonged endeavor.
“They’re defeated, they can’t make a comeback,” Trump said of Iran during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday. “They now have a chance to make a deal. But that’s up to them.”
Diplomatic efforts continue
Trump has made clear in recent days that he wants a quick end to the war, even if he’s not yet sure how exactly to secure it. After threatening last week to bomb Iran’s power plants, Trump backed down, saying he had gotten indications that Iranian officials were now willing to talk.
On Thursday, he further extended the timeline, declaring that he’d hold off until April 6 on targeting Iranian energy infrastructure in hopes of making progress at the negotiating table.
Still, it’s unclear how fruitful those efforts will be. A 15-point peace proposal drawn up by Trump officials was swiftly rejected by Iran. The regime’s own demands — which included paying war damages and reparations — was also deemed a nonstarter.
And while Trump has continued to insist that the talks are “going very well,” he’s alternately threatened to step up attacks in a bid to force Iran to capitulate if it does not cooperate.
“It’s the job of the Pentagon to make preparations in order to give the Commander in Chief maximal optionality,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “It does not mean the President has made a decision, and as the President said in the Oval Office recently, he is not planning to send ground troops anywhere at this time.”
The US and Israel have already subjected Iran to weeks of intense shelling, killing a swath of senior leaders and taking out much of the nation’s offensive capabilities.
Still, the Iranian regime has only further consolidated its control over the country. It’s also tightened its grip on the Strait of Hormuz, effectively choking off the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf and throwing the global energy markets into a crisis that’s worsening by the day. Administration officials have sought ways to eliminate that key point of economic leverage, either by seizing control of the strait or decimating Iran’s ability to continue its own lucrative export of oil.
“They don’t have an incentive to let up the pressure on the strait right now,” said Landon Derentz, a former national security and energy official during the Obama, Biden and first Trump administrations. “And I don’t see any policy levers that provide any material impact on our ability to backfill the scale of the shortfall.”
Remaining options likely require boots on the ground
There are only so many options left both to secure the strait and advance US interests in Iran enough for Trump to convincingly declare victory. And officials are increasingly convinced that nearly all of them would likely require troops, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions.
Administration officials have debated separate ideas for extracting the enriched uranium that remains buried within Iran’s nuclear facilities, a mission that some believe could provide Trump with the clear win he needs to end the war, sources familiar with the discussions said.
Officials have also developed options for capturing Kharg Island, which handles roughly 90% of Iran’s crude exports, or authorizing a bombing raid aimed at effectively wiping out its oil infrastructure. And the administration has examined the potential for taking over other strategically placed islands near the strait that might weaken Iran’s ability to threaten tankers trying to traverse the waterway.
White House officials believe that taking Kharg Island in particular would “totally bankrupt” Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, one official said, potentially paving the way for a definitive end to the war. And should Trump’s recent diplomatic efforts fail, some of his advisers and intelligence officials have argued in private that troops will be needed to effectively force Iran to the table.
Yet there is another, equal concern throughout Trump’s orbit: Any escalation — especially if it includes ground forces — could prove disastrous. None of the options available to Trump are guaranteed to end the conflict, even if successfully executed from a tactical perspective, said one source familiar with the plans.
Perhaps more alarmingly, it would introduce new uncertainties that could quickly spiral out of Trump’s control, pulling him deeper into a war that he’s increasingly eager to end quickly.
Military escalation by the US would almost certainly prompt Iran to retaliate in kind, potentially by striking energy-related targets in the region. The regime’s missile attacks on the Ras Laffan natural gas facility in Qatar earlier this month have already significantly damaged parts of the major industrial site, spurring fears in the energy markets of a widening regional war.
Iran could also call on the regime-aligned Houthi rebels to begin targeting oil tankers that have been diverted from the Strait of Hormuz to the Red Sea, which has served as the only relatively safe pathway for shipping owners to move at least some of their product through the region since the war began, said a senior oil shipping broker.
“The Red Sea actually has been an issue for probably three years. But there’s enough owners that are comfortable enough going through there now,” the shipping broker said. “If there was a major issue in the Red Sea, then it could pose a choke off of oil coming from the Iranian Gulf.”
Escalation fears
For some Trump aides and allies, those economic risks pale in comparison to the peril that American soldiers could face on the ground in Iran under nearly every scenario. The US has so far limited the toll on its military, a priority viewed as crucial to maintaining the limited public support that still exists for the war.
But seizing and holding islands near the Strait of Hormuz or sending special forces into Iran’s interior in search of its enriched uranium would immediately open the US up to the potential for significant numbers of casualties, eliminating any doubt in voters’ minds that what Trump has termed a minor “excursion” or “detour” is instead a full-fledged war.
Already, several GOP senators have signaled they would oppose any deployment of troops into Iran, foreshadowing the potential for a major fissure within a party that has largely lined up behind Trump’s war aims until now.
And despite the pressure that such a mission could put on Iran if successful, there remain grave concerns about how US forces would pull it off. Iran has spent recent weeks laying traps and moving weapons to Kharg Island, CNN has previously reported.
Even before that, analysts said, any invasion of the island would have been treacherous, requiring troops to endure constant missile and drone attacks — and then hope that they can hold the island long enough to force Iran to surrender.
“This would give Trump the opportunity to say, ‘I now control Iran’s oil,” said Gregory Brew, a senior analyst on Iran and the energy sector at political risk firm Eurasia Group. “The issue with that is the Iranians aren’t going to immediately capitulate. Instead, they’re going to react extremely negatively.”
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