President Trump keeps signaling that the Iran war he started with Israel is nowhere close to completion, despite his repeated assurances otherwise — and despite the war’s mounting economic costs, largely stemming from the Strait of Hormuz’s near-closure. More U.S. troops keep arriving in the Middle East as Trump weighs various options for a ground offensive to accomplish his objective of…well, that seems to change by the day. Trump has struggled to even articulate the goals of the war, which have pinballed from regime change to destroying Iran’s missile capability to forestalling the country from producing a nuclear weapon — which makes settling on a plan somewhat more difficult. Still, that if Trump does choose to escalate, he will likely he choose from a suite of options that would accomplish specific military goals, like extracting Iran’s uranium — a highly risky operation that Trump is open to, per a Wall Street Journal report on Sunday night.

As Rosemary Kelanic sees it, that would the worst of the likely options Trump is being presented with. Kelanic is director of the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities, and previously taught at Notre Dame and Williams College. She is also the author of the book Black Gold and Blackmail: Oil and Great Power Politics and a frequent contributor to media outlets on energy policy and U.S. strategy in the Middle East. I spoke with her about various scenarios for U.S. ground troops in Iran, from the merely dangerous to the “nonsensical.”

The Pentagon is reportedly considering sending another 10,000 ground troops to the Middle East, on top of the 50,000 already there. Do you have any sense of whether this is more of a faint than a prelude to a new military operation? Is there any way of telling the difference between those two?There’s no real way of telling the difference between those two, which is what makes it so effective as a potential bargaining tactic but also as potential preparations for war. You can move forces into the theater and the adversary doesn’t really know what you’re going to use them for. But just based on what we’ve seen Trump do over the past year of his presidency, I doubt very much this is a bargaining tactic. It seems likely to me that this is a genuine escalation, or at least that he’s seriously considering escalating if those 10,000 troops materialize. That number is not enough to invade large areas of Iran, but it’s enough to get into some serious trouble. And it just shows this dynamic of how missions tend to expand beyond what you think they’re going to be when you start a war.

Mission creep.Absolutely. Mission creep, occupation creep — it’s pretty textbook in this case. So whatever the objective of this force is, and we’ve heard about at least three potential objectives — seizing nuclear material, taking Kharg Island, securing islands in the Strait of Hormuz — it’s not clear if they’re adequate for any of those things. Or maybe they are, but if you find out they’re not adequate, then you’ll have a vast sucking sound bringing more troops to the region. We saw this in Afghanistan. Afghanistan started off with two MEUs and some CIA guys. 10 years later, in 2011, it peaked at 100,000 ground forces. These things have a way of expanding.

And the U.S. does not have a great history of deescalation once we get to this stage.No, it doesn’t. and Trump himself certainly doesn’t. So it’s very concerning and people should be worried.

Don’t worry, I already am. You mentioned those three scenarios. Which of those are the most fearsome to you, or the most difficult? Is one more plausible than another?I think the nuclear raid would be the most difficult, hands down. And I think it’s important to consider whether you could do the mission tactically, but athe strategic effects. Even if you achieve the mission, what does it mean for the larger conflict, and does it end the war? I don’t think any of these are going to have war-ending implications, even if the tactical objectives are achieved. But trying to dig out nuclear material that’s buried under rubble in enemy territory in mountainous regions when they know you’re coming…

It sounds like a Rambo plotline. It’s that level of far-fetched. It really is. How do you get the digging equipment there? Then maybe you’d use the Airborne guys to try to take an airfield. I don’t know if they even have an airfield near some of these sites — some of them are near big cities. So maybe you take the airfield in the big city, but then you have to defend it from ongoing enemy fire for days, weeks maybe, to dig out the uranium and dispose of it in some way. Maybe you downblend it there. I’ve seen some speculation about that. Maybe you find a way to destroy it. Maybe you take it with you, but that’s a long operation.

That’s counting on the fact that we even know where all the uranium is, which is not a given at all.Absolutely. They’re not dumb, right? They’ve hidden stuff. They could have decoy stockpiles out there. We just don’t know.

Then there’s Kharg Island, the center of Iran’s oil-export business. What are your thoughts on an operation there?It’s still really dangerous. It’s easier for them to get there, presumably, though if the Marines have to sail through the Strait of Hormuz, they’ll come under fire, and then they’d have to sail all the way up the coastline toward Kharg, since it’s at the top of the Persian Gulf. The U.S. could drop in paratroopers, but paratroopers could land in the ocean, or in hostile territory. So there’s problems with that as well, although it might be easier than an amphibious assault. Any kind of amphibious assault is really dangerous because there’s no cover, there’s no concealment, there’s just running on the shore of a beach. And Kharg itself is so close to Iran that they can target you from the mainland at the same time.

Then once you get there, you have to resupply the troops, and you have to hold the island. And I could see this beng a nightmare scenario where we’ve put all these guys that are basically hostages to Iran on this island that is constantly under fire. And it’s just a cockamamie theory of victory. How does taking Kharg change Iran’s strategic calculus? It doesn’t. They’re not going to go through a whole month of war and then decide, oh, you took our big oil terminal. I guess we’re going to have to surrender. They can export their oil from other places; hey’ll just turn off the tap to Kharg. And even if they couldn’t export that oil, their military operations are cheap. They don’t need all this oil money to make a bunch of drones.

The U.S. could gain the same outcome strategically by just bombing the oil facilities on Kharg — you don’t need to insert troops to do it. But I don’t think they’ll actually go for Kharg. I think it’s just a decoy, a disinformation thing. They’re trying to confuse the narrative for strategic purposes. But if they actually did, it would show you that Trump is willing to lose U.S. casualties to keep Iranian oil facilities intact. That would raise my eyebrows about why he’d do that. Is it some kind of play for Iran’s oil? It makes no sense whatsoever.

The third option you mentioned is more limited operation that would somehow facilitate the opening of the Strait of Hormuz. Not that any of these make a lot of sense, but that would seem to be the one that makes the most sense. It does, but it would be costly and it’s not clear to me that putting forces there is the best way to do it, either, because they’d be targeted the same way the tankers and container ships would be targeted. I’ve seen some arguments that if you take the islands, you could deprive Iran of the ability to use the islands to send attack boats out.

Some have said no, you’d really have to take the coastline. If you’re going to try to take the mountainous coastline of mainland Iran to try to get all the dug-in missiles and stuff out of the area, it would be Gallipoli. So you don’t really want to do that either. You’re probably better off with helicopters and planes trying to cover oiltankers. But at the end of the day, how many tankers will want to try to go through Hormuz being escorted by the U.S. military, which means that they are super duper targeted, versus paying $2 million to the Tehran tollbooth and going through that way? That’s the alternative Iran is putting out there.

So it doesn’t sound like you think any of these military options are really going to be that fruitful. The traditional way of ending a war — negotiations — probably makes more sense.That’s the only way, and the question is how much are we going to expend in terms of blood and treasure and in terms of our exquisite munitions that are hard to replace, before we get to the point where we still have to sit down at the table with the Iranians and make concessions? We have lost bargaining power as a result of this war. And the more we sink costs in, we keep trying to chase those costs, but we just dig yourself deeper. And the first rule of digging yourself into a hole is stop digging. This is getting a giant excavator to make the hole bigger and wider.

A talent of Trump’s is that he is able to confidently declare victory on any objective and move on. That he hasn’t done so on Iran has been surprising to me. It is surprising. And you know what? It might work. If the U.S. stopped attacking Iran, it’s possible Iran would stop attacking Gulf countries and start letting tankers go through Hormuz. The thing that Trump’s not going to like is if Iran then tries to charge new tolls for that. It would be humiliating to Trump and it would increase oil prices a little bit, but it would still be a lower increase than what we’re looking at now with the thing totally closed. Something that ends the war with Iran having obviously increased leverage would be humiliating to Trump, but the U.S. can live with. it It’s not a good outcome; it would have been better off if we had never started this war in the first place and Iran never asserted this leverage over Hormuz. But giving Iran the capacity or allowing them to have the capacity to tax transit through there is still a better outcome than trying to put large numbers of troops on the ground.

Speaking of the worst possible outcome, we’ve discussed these three modes of attack that are all risky, but limited. Do you think there’s any world in which U.S. launches a full ground invasion country, like in Iraq?It’s possible. But it wouldn’t look like Iraq. it would look more like Afghanistan, just because of the topography. Iran is four times the size of Iraq, with mountains that are higher than the mountains in Switzerland. The cities are in the middle. They’re not on the coastline, so they’re harder to get to. And it’s an urbanized country. So you’ve got the urban warfare that you could have in Iraq, like Fallujah, but also giant valleys that are flat and perfect for armored warfare, and mountainous terrain that’s really hard to get to. And you’d have to fly several hundred miles into the country to get to Tehran. So it’s not a good scene.

Sounds great, I don’t see the problem.Right. It’s pretty hard to imagine. Then again, the US capacity for doing things that are strategically counterproductive is vast. You can’t totally rule it out, but it should be completely ruled out. It would be nonsensical.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

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