That same month, the Pentagon deployed the elite 82nd Airborne Division, reportedly tasked with seizing roughly 450 kg of enriched uranium. Trump later shelved the plan, saying he had no wish to put American soldiers' lives at risk. Since then, 17 American soldiers have been killed.
As late as mid-June, the president was still weighing an occupation of the island, though no ground operation has yet materialized, even as the United States' Arab allies press their protector behind closed doors to launch one.
With the war dragging on and showing no sign of ending, most Gulf states are losing patience, and their leaders are now pushing Trump to escalate further, Bloomberg sources acknowledged.
Yet leaders from Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Oman are far from united on whether escalation is even necessary, according to Bloomberg. Qatar, in particular, is pressing for calm and a return to negotiations.
Other officials take the opposite view, arguing that the US should now occupy Kharg or even deploy troops to the Iranian mainland, both American and Arab sources told the agency. As Bloomberg put it, describing the Gulf states' thinking, "These officials believe Iran’s leaders won’t back down and relinquish their grip over the Strait of Hormuz unless the US takes more aggressive action."
Iran, too, is bracing for ground forces to enter the war. Army spokesman Mohammad Akrami-Nia said on state television on Tuesday that Tehran would bomb its own territory rather than let it fall under American occupation. "If America occupies our territory, we will even bomb our own territory", he said, adding, "This is the logic of war."
An unofficial voice for Iran's theocratic government in the US has also claimed that Tehran has spent decades preparing for a ground invasion by American forces. The remark came from Iranian-American scholar Mohammad Marandi, in comments quoted by Fox News.
"The Americans are planning an invasion. I am not saying it will necessarily happen. I am not saying it will necessarily happen in the next few days. But they have plans for an invasion", said Marandi, a former advisor to Iran's nuclear negotiating team during its recent talks with the US in Pakistan, speaking to political analyst Glenn Diesen.
Kuwait Emerges as a New Battleground
Former foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki went further, suggesting that Tehran's army and Revolutionary Guards should seize a US base in the region and take its soldiers captive. Other officials have called for the capture of Bubiyan, the Kuwaiti island reportedly already contested as early as 1 May.
At the time, Kuwait's Ministry of the Interior announced that six Revolutionary Guard members had landed on the emirate's easternmost island aboard a chartered fishing boat, an incident the Guards' command dismissed as an unfounded accusation.
Unverified claims of a planned operation against the island are now circulating, particularly on social media, where pro-Iranian channels are urging Tehran to deploy the elite Saberin Guard unit, said by Euronews to have extensive experience fighting beyond Iran's borders.
Iran's threats against Kuwait have not gone unnoticed elsewhere. Writing in the prominent London-based newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, its former editor-in-chief, Abdulrahman Al-Rashed, observed that statements from the semi-official Tasnim News Agency "closely mirror those issued by Baghdad prior to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990".
The veteran bilingual journalist argues that Tehran is using the US military presence as a pretext for attack, even though American troops have long been stationed in the region precisely to deter such an invasion.
Al-Rashed contends that Iran is, in effect, losing ground in the war, having risked its main bargaining chip: control over the Strait of Hormuz. On the US naval blockade, he added that "whenever [Iran] loses a strategic card, it hastens to open a new front to reproduce tools of pressure and blackmail".
This new front, he writes, includes the Bab el-Mandeb Strait between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, currently under the control of Yemen's Houthi rebels. The movement, officially known as Ansar Allah (Supporters of Allah), has been fighting a civil war since 2014 against an internationally recognized coalition backed by Saudi Arabia.
Having also joined the war against Israel, the Houthis are one of the core groups in Iran's so-called Axis of Resistance. True to form, the Shiite militants responded immediately to Tehran's call and shut down the strait.
Ships in the Red Sea have already begun turning back, according to Czech economist Lukas Kovanda, who explained that the Saudi monarchy had been relying on the Red Sea route after rerouting its exports through east-west pipelines once the Strait of Hormuz was closed.
Tankers bound for Egypt's Suez Canal must now turn back and sail around Africa instead, a detour that Kovanda estimates will add roughly 33 days to their voyage and push up the price of fossil fuels.
Kovanda explained that supertankers must also unload about half their cargo before entering the Suez Canal, with the oil transported separately via the Sumed pipeline across the Egyptian mainland and reloaded onto the ship once it clears the canal. He added that the closure of the Mandeb Strait means tankers now face this same process on their return journey as well.
Trump's Domestic Gamble
Iran, then, is succeeding both in disrupting global fossil fuel trade and in projecting its power across to the opposite shore of the Arabian Peninsula. Even US intelligence agencies now regard the nightly airstrikes as "toothless", having neither degraded the Islamic Republic's capabilities nor pushed it toward negotiating on American terms.
That assessment comes from an intelligence report shared with the Washington Post by several anonymous officials. As the newspaper quoted from the document, "Iran's government is unlikely to feel significant impact or soften its negotiating position as a result of new rounds of U.S. military strikes like those now underway."
US intelligence agencies view this limbo between ceasefire and open war as especially dangerous, with airstrikes on both sides growing deadlier by the week. According to sources who spoke to The Post, the escalation of US attacks "appears to have led to a stalemate".
"But with the war deeply unpopular at home,continuing escalation by the United States, such as the possible introduction of ground troops, poses political risks for the president with no guarantee of military success", the assessment adds.
Robert Tait, an analyst for The Guardian, raised a further possibility: that Trump might be willing to sacrifice domestic political stability altogether. Like many observers, he notes that the war against Iran is unpopular across nearly every demographic group.
"Less than four months before November’s midterm elections in which Democrats are seeking to recapture both houses of Congress, Trump appears to be flirting with electoral disaster in re-stoking a war that is already unpopular with voters – not least for its inflationary impact on fuel and living costs", Tait explained.
He noted that the administration had briefly reversed its slide in popularity by signing a memorandum of understanding with Iran, a framework agreement for a ceasefire meant to halt the fighting and keep negotiations alive.
Yet among Trump's own supporters, those who do not share the pro-war neoconservative outlook now regard the resumption of combat as the final blow to Republican hopes of holding either the Senate or the House.
"I think it's a total loser. It's evidence that Trump doesn't really care about the midterms. He's like Icarus with the sun with this stuff – it seems to be a personal vendetta with the Iranians", Tait quoted Curt Mills, executive editor of the American Conservative website, as saying.
"Trump now has an adversary that is willing to suffer a lot more than he thought. They are willing to risk on playing the strait of Hormuz card because it puts them in charge of so much of the global energy supply and turns some of the wealthiest countries in the Gulf into their hostages", added analyst Alex Vatanka of the Middle East Institute.
