Seize Iran's enriched uranium. Take Kharg Island. Bomb the power grid. Arm Kurdish and Baluchi separatists. The United States has a range of escalation options in the Iran war. According to a detailed analysis by a former senior Pentagon official, every single one of them makes things worse.
Ilan Goldenberg, who served as Iran Team Chief in the Office of the Secretary of Defense under Obama and later advised Vice President Kamala Harris, assessed the full spectrum of escalatory paths in Foreign Affairs, as "Hvylya" reports.
The most dramatic option - a ground operation to seize Iran's stockpile of highly enriched uranium from tunnels in Isfahan - would require U.S. forces on the ground for hours or days, hundreds of miles inside Iran, at one of its most heavily defended sites. The uranium is stored in gas-form canisters that are difficult to transport, and tunnel entrances may be blocked from previous strikes. Iran would almost certainly be expecting such a move. "It is not clear that such an operation is feasible, much less prudent," Goldenberg wrote.
Taking Kharg Island - through which 90 percent of Iran's oil exports flow - is logistically more feasible but strategically hollow. The regime has endured years of crushing sanctions without changing course, and seizing its oil lifeline would almost certainly provoke retaliatory strikes on energy infrastructure across the Gulf - the very outcome Washington has been trying to prevent.
Arming separatist forces inside Iran - Kurdish groups in the northwest, Baluchi militants on the Pakistani border - carries the risk of producing "not regime change but fragmentation and civil war," Goldenberg warned. Turkey, Pakistan, and Gulf states would intervene to back their preferred factions. The result would resemble the chaos in Syria and Libya - and Iran sits at the center of a region that includes Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, where a collapse could generate instability spilling across multiple borders.
Trump's March 22 threat to target Iran's power plants, meanwhile, would hurt civilians while achieving little strategic effect. Tehran would more likely respond by hitting similar infrastructure in the Gulf states than by capitulating to U.S. demands. In past conflicts - Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan - the United States escalated in pursuit of decisive outcomes only to deepen its predicament. Goldenberg argued the current war presents the same temptation and the same trap.
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