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The US has a bunch of different options in Iran, but none of them are particularly good. Ordered from least aggressive to most aggressive:
The US washes its hands of the conflict, and withdraws from the Middle East entirely, including its bases in the region. Arguably this is the best long-term solution since the US presence is nowhere near commensurate with its strategic interests in the area, but doing this now looks like Iran would be singlehandedly running the US out of town, handing it a massive propaganda win and the US a massive propaganda loss. This is not seriously being considered.
The US washes its hands of the conflict, but remains in the region hoping for a status quo ante bellum but prepared to accept some sort of Iranian victory in terms of tolling the straits, regional proxies, etc. In the meantime, US bases in the region are still targets although the US can evacuate soldiers temporarily. Still a major prestige hit for the US and a big propaganda win for Iran, and eventually the US would have to deal with an emboldened + strengthened Iran, so it's just can-kicking while the problem festers.
The current operation: The US continues its high-intensity but noncommital air attacks hoping Iran blinks. If it doesn't, the US tries to wedge open the strait regardless. The best insight into how this would go is this video by Perun (who is easily one of the best defense analysts publicly posting). To summarize, the US has done an excellent job at pulverizing Iran's conventional forces like its frigates, submarines, and airframes, but it can only do an OK job at suppressing asymmetric tools like the "mosquito fleet" that could dump a few mines into the water, its shoot-and-scoot anti-ship missile launchers, and drones. The US could reduce the rate of these quite a bit, but getting them down to zero is implausible. To reopen the strait then, the US would have to heavily subsidize ship insurance, but this alone would be insufficient -- you'd likely see a few brave captains willing to YOLO it but most shipping companies probably wouldn't be willing to go full Lord Farquaad with their crew. Naval escorts would be required. The problem is that the US just doesn't have enough hulls in the region to do the dual mission. If it pulls ships away from the suppression campaign to put them on escort duty, then the rate of Iranian asymmetric fire would likely increase again. European and Asian allies would actually come in clutch here since they don't have a lot of ships with the magazine depth of an Arleigh Burke nor the power projection of a supercarrier, but they do have a lot of frigates that would be great at escort duty. The problem is that allies have been noncommital so far, and, uh, Trump isn't exactly the best diplomat. Maybe he'll be able to blackmail them into some sort of arrangement, but he'll have a steep hill to climb. There's not exactly a lot of goodwill from other democracies to come pull America's chestnuts out of the fire.
Economic warfare: The US tries to strangle Iran's economy by shutting down oil exports. The US has naval supremacy, so doing this to its maritime exports would not be hard. Iran wasn't exactly in a great economic position before the conflict, and shutting down a major chunk of its oil exports would be another severe blow. The best-case scenario is this being the straw that breaks the camel's back and triggers a general uprising that overthrows the regime. But the Iranian state is very adept at suppressing dissent, and there was already a major crackdown before the war started. If there's not a general uprising, then there might be some slim hope for this to make the regime buckle in some other way -- maybe some senior leaders rely on oil exports for their corrupt slush fund, and if this gets taken out then perhaps they try to seize control of the state and negotiate an end. But at this point we're mostly wishcasting. Also, shutting down Iran's oil exports would worsen the global supply situation which would boomerang on the US, and it would probably take more than a few weeks before the effects really started biting Iran.
The US invades Kharg island by air or by sea. The US could almost certainly take the island relatively easily, but stationing marines there for an extended period would expose them to strikes from the Iranian coast. It's a decent ways from the mainland, but not far enough that it would be considered "safe" by any means. People have speculated that this would be used to shut down Iranian seabound oil exports, but that's already very doable with the US navy in the region, so the main point of this would be to use it as a bargaining chip of some sort. "See how serious we are, we're willing to invade sovereign Iranian territory!" That sort of thing.
The US invades Qeshm island, which is situated in the narrowest part of the strait. This removes one of the easiest launch points and lets the US set up a defensive perimeter as well as being another bargaining chip to hand back to Iran to get them to make peace. But it alone doesn't remove Iran's ability to target ships, it just removes one avenue. It's also fairly large, well-populated, and situated closer to the Iranian mainland than Kharg with Bandar Abbas right there. All this puts US troops at much greater risk while still not forcing a decisive outcome.
The US invades a bunch of Iranian islands like Kharg, Qeshm, Kish, Lavan, Siri, Abumusa, etc. This gives more bargaining chips I guess, but I don't know what the other islands would give beyond that. I've heard some people float the idea of giving Musa and Tunbs back to the UAE after Iran seized it from them a few decades ago, but otherwise Iran still has the mainland and can still credibly threaten ships.
The US invades the Iranian mainland to establish a buffer zone between the regime and the Gulf. The larger it is the more effective it would be at stopping shorter range missiles and patrolling for random fishing boats with mines, but this is a massive escalation and would take many tens of thousands of troops at the minimum to be effective, and at this point Iran could switch from targeting ships to targeting US soldiers until it hopes the US loses political will.
The US invades, and seeks to balkanize the country through its various ethnic minorities to render it impotent. This would reduce US exposure over the longer term, but it's unlikely to get much backing if those regions think the US will just abandon them in short order without giving them their own means of establishing deterrence. It would also inflame regional tensions -- I doubt the Turks would like a Kurdish pseudo-state on their border, and ditto for Pakistan in terms of a Baloch state.
The US does a full regime-change invasion and seeks to occupy the entire country to force an end once and for all. The smallest operation could be something with special forces to take out Iranian nuke stockpiles assuming US intelligence knew where they were, but even that would mostly just be can-kicking since they could just restart their nuclear program after the US left. The long-term solution would be to occupy everything, dismantle the nuclear program and missiles, put a Delcy Rodriguez in charge that's more amenable to US interests, then leave ASAP and cross their fingers that it doesn't all revert afterwards. Going this route would require months of preparation, hundreds of thousands of troops, and a large amount of political will that I doubt the US has.
I think anything that ends with “USA leaves without meeting the objectives of ending Iranian support for terrorism and ending the nuclear ambitions of Iran” are failure with extra steps. And really leaving Iran in control of Hormuz is also pretty much a dead end. If you go to war, you can’t stop without a victory of some sort unless you want to destroy credibility as a war-fighting civilization. Nations can easily detect weakness and will exploit it for their advantage. If Iran can defeat the USA with commodity prices, every other country with natural resources or the ability to destroy them with missiles is going to do so rather than be invaded or submissive to the USA. China can do so with rare earths, any country in the Middle East can do so with oil, Egypt and Panama can close their shipping lanes and disrupt trade. That’s not a good place to be in because any time these countries want something or want to stymie the West, the hostage situation “don’t you dare stop us or the global economy gets it” comes out.
I think we need to keep in mind the specific strategic goals Rubio laid out at the beginning and has been sticking two whenever he gives a speech:
We've done the middle two very comprehensively. We're doing the first pretty thoroughly. The last one is hard to define a victory condition of, how do you destroy a "chance?" But the US can say, 3/4 isn't that bad, and take that as a win given the primary goals the leadership has been sticking to this whole time.
Indeed, we've totally obliterated the Iranian military at least once a week since the war began.
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This isn't possible. Specifically the word "ever". An industrial civilization with 1940s tech can make a nuke. "Ever" is a very long time.
I'd accept "5 years", I'd accept "10 years", passed that and there's quite a lot of hopium getting involved.
But "ever" isn't possible unless you 1) essentially genocide them by quite literally bombing them back to the stone age, which isn't feasible or 2) 100% occupy the country like Germany or Japan and reshape them in a more desirable image, which is also wildly unfeasible (although more feasible than 1)
Unless by 'they' one means 'the mullahs' regime'.
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But does the spice flow? The previous Iran leadership at least played lip service to working relations with it's Arab neighbors. The new leadership, or fragments thereof, seem much more willing to break norms. The US may be done with the war, but that doesn't mean that the war is done with the US (or at least it's allies/interests). If the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf remains blocked, heavily impacted, tolled etc. no one is going to view that as a US win, not even Americans if gas prices remain high and downstream inflation picks up as result (both direct from gas prices, and indirect through increased energy costs and imports from directly impacted countries).
The previous Iranian leadership apparently told the KSA and the other Gulf states that if they were attacked by anyone, they'd attack the Gulf states. This was supposed to get those states to discourage attacks by the US, but it apparently had the opposite effect, since the various princes and emirs are not France.
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The oil point has arguably been widely known since the 70s and the rare earth point was kind of made during the China tariff news phase last year.
Colonial wars can never be fought against zealots. You can fight them against fat local elites who value their lives and wealth and local fiefdoms over the cause, because eventually they will sue for peace or flee. But you cannot fight them successfully against those truly, strongly motivated by an ideology. The US has never been willing to pay the required price to overthrow the Islamic Revolution since 1979, and that is as true today as it was then and as it has been throughout the period between the two.
Against true believers, only total war works. In very, very limited cases (like the Boer War) an extraordinarily capable colonial power can win these, although they require extraordinarily disproportionate resources and are often not worth it even when attempted.
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