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The conventional wisdom is that US President Donald Trump will eventually negotiate a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and bring the war in Iran to a close. Nafeez Ahmed in Byline Times has argued the reverse is true: that the strait may now be closed for good, and that this is the new shape of the region.
Either way, Trump’s constant announcements (he’s up to 38) about a deal being just around the corner are not remotely credible, and haven’t been for some time. On Thursday, following a round of tit-for-tat fire, Trump promised a night of “hard strikes” and that US forces will even take Kharg Island through which Iran exports 90% of its oil, and take control of Iranian oil and gas facilities.
Both the US and Iran are sticking to maximalist demands, and Iran believes it has the upper hand in both the war and the negotiations. The recent strikes between Israel and Iran further illustrate that Israel will need to be involved in ending the war as well.
There are, however, some options that haven’t been explored – mostly because they’re even worse than the continued closure of the strait. Three of them are an unrestricted air campaign, ground invasion, and abject US surrender. All are terrible options for different reasons, but they would achieve the goal of opening the strait and bringing the war to a close.
Unrestricted Aerial Warfare
The first option is some form of unrestricted aerial warfare designed to make conditions on the ground in Iran inconsistent with life. The key component of this strategy would be strikes against water infrastructure, including dams, reservoirs, desalination plants, and pumping stations. It would also likely include the destruction of electrical infrastructure to ensure that any surviving pumping stations had no power. This would result in a humanitarian crisis of an almost unimaginable magnitude, with tens of millions fleeing or dying of thirst or disease.
Both the US and Iran know that if the US does this, Iran will target desalination plants across the Persian Gulf, turning a country-level mass death and refugee event into a regional one. To avoid this, the US might consider using one or more nuclear high-altitude electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) to destroy electronic devices across Iran that use transistors: which is to say, virtually any electronic device more sophisticated than a toaster.
This would certainly limit Iran’s ability to conduct counter-strikes against Gulf state water infrastructure in retaliation. It would also turn a conventional conflict into a nuclear one, albeit one where nothing on the ground is destroyed. Regardless, it would constitute a mass crime against humanity. The EMP might also violate US policy against nuclear first strike, although Trump and US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth have spent the past 17 months putting military leadership in place that would be more amenable to green-lighting it.
This option has the potential to be the “cleanest” victory for the US, with Iran destroyed and Trump appearing strong. It would also be a huge crime against humanity and completely unite the world against the US.
There’s also no guarantee it would work. Controlling the exact area of effect for a nuclear electromagnetic pulse is extremely difficult because the pulse is a large-scale environmental reaction rather than a localised blast. Once a nuclear device is detonated, the EMP footprint is determined by natural atmospheric physics and the Earth’s magnetic field, making precise targeting nearly impossible.
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Ground Invasion
The US could attempt a ground invasion of some sort, such as taking strategic islands in the Gulf, taking and holding the area around the strait, or driving to Tehran for another attempted regime change. Any sort of ground invasion would require huge amounts of manpower and materiel. Iran is three times larger than Iraq, and the US didn’t have enough troops to deal with that conflict either.
To even attempt the Iranian mainland would require incredibly unpopular, massive call-ups of reservists and even retirees, and mass mobilisation of US assets. It would turn into a massive counter-insurgency campaign on one side of the front line, while fighting a conventional war against troops armed with drones on the other. Sustaining the war would likely require reinstating the draft. There would be significant casualties, and no good way to leave without it looking like capitulation. In other words, the US would go from being waist deep in a quagmire of its own creation to neck deep.
It’s also likely to get shot down in a Republican-controlled Congress after 60 days. Congress has so far rejected Democratic attempts to invoke the War Powers Act (which lets Congress force an end to military action) and stop attacks on Iran.
The invasion option would be bloody and messy, and would destroy the Republican Party. Trump would no longer be able to threaten Republicans within his own party with support of their primary opponents, and it would force Congressional Republicans to break with a President who is notoriously petty and vindictive to those he sees as having betrayed him.
Regardless, it would send Republicans into the 2026 mid-terms with presidential approval ratings in the high 20s – a historic low – and Congressional Republicans forced to choose between crossing the President or backing a war even less popular than Vietnam.
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Declare Victory and Go Home
This option is effectively “give Iran what it wants without looking like you gave Iran what it wants”. The goal of the Trump administration would be to take any little Iranian concession as a success, claim that the Iranian military was destroyed, and declare that the US has achieved a great victory. Trump knows he can convince his base of ridiculous things, from belief that elections are rigged against him to Canada being the enemy of America. Convincing people this gullible that the US won the war as long as the Strait is open and gas prices drop will be like shooting fish in a barrel.
If Iran’s leaders sense that the US is starting to cave, however, their already maximalist demands will keep growing. They will demand monetary restitution and full control over the Strait. Trump could “open the strait”, but only after accepting round after round of increasingly embarrassing Iranian demands. This will take time, because Iran will want to keep sweetening its deal, but the strait would eventually reopen.
This too would be humiliating for Washington, but so long as Trump’s base and low-information moderates buy into the lies about the outcome, the political price for this ill-conceived war will be minimised, despite the catastrophic foreign policy consequences of leaving Iran as the de facto superpower and undisputed master of the Middle East.
The wild card in all of this is Israel. It is not dumb enough to believe Trump’s bluster, and will recognise a deal that is effectively a surrender for what it is. Israel will be inclined to take matters into its own hands and can easily make the war go hot again, or even potentially invoke its own version of unrestricted aerial warfare (option one above).
To prevent this, Trump and the Republicans would have to use some exceptionally nasty strong-arm tactics, including threats of cutting off all arms deals. This too will have political consequences in the US; to date, the pro-Israeli / pro-Netanyahu lobby in the US has supported Trump. That can easily change.
Of the three options discussed above, I believe that “declare victory and go home” is the most likely outcome. Trump is bored with the war and wants to simply make it go away. He’s always been willing to declare bankruptcy and walk away from the messes he’s made. He’s never thought about things from a long-term or strategic perspective, and wants to enter the 2026 mid-terms with the entire affair swept under the rug.
The majority of the American public won’t realise that leaving Iran in control of the Middle East is a strategic defeat for the US. Nor will they care, if gas is below $3 a gallon.