In American slang, “in a stew” means to be in a difficult situation. Italians say pasticciaccio — a baked pasta dish — to describe an awful mess. Israelis prepare shakshuka, a delicious North African stew, but it can also mean a chaotic situation.
The current situation in the Gulf is a shakshuka — a complicated mess. It involves a host of adversaries operating on multiple fronts. The U.S. and Israel can turn up the heat, but that may cause the pot to boil over with consequences far beyond the region. This IntelBrief examines Washington’s options. Iranians and their proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq have their own calculations.
In his recent speech to the UN General Assembly, U.S. President Donald Trump outlined a binary approach to the conflict: either a deal or annihilation. In reality, the situation is more complicated. There are no easy military solutions.
The U.S. can assemble a naval coalition to restore free passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Considerable progress has been made in keeping oil flowing through the Strait — crude oil is currently being shipped at 80 percent of the pre-war volume. Adding the amounts that are being pumped through pipelines, the total is reportedly at 98 percent of the pre-war volume. Far less refined products are being shipped, but that is because of the damage inflicted on infrastructure. And shipments of other vital products like fertilizers remain below pre-war volumes.
To guarantee the continued safety of merchant vessels and oil terminals would require continued naval escorts and protection of port facilities. The burden for this will fall largely on the United States. The Europeans have indicated their reluctance to send warships to the Gulf. It is difficult to envision a scenario where American allies would contribute to an air or a naval campaign in a war initiated without any consultation. The United States needs to end Iran’s ability to threaten shipping once and for all or at least dissuade Tehran from using it.
The U.S. can continue its naval blockade of Iranian ports. The blockade is just the physical manifestation of a broader sanctions regime. Taken together, the sanctions and blockade have been highly effective at cutting off trade. The Iranian economy has been devastated. The U.S. believes that the combination of sanctions and blockade will force Iran’s leadership to yield.
It remains difficult, however, to assess Iran’s tolerance for pain. Siege warfare is slow, naval deployments are costly, and Iran’s leaders themselves will be the last to suffer. The U.S. had Iraq under economic siege for years. It brought about economic collapse and a humanitarian crisis, but it still took an invasion to bring down Saddam Hussein.
And it is difficult to maintain a siege when it causes continuing damage to the world economy. The U.S. can increase economic pressure. With “Operation Economic Outcast,” announced by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in August 2026, the U.S. has expanded its sanctions to include secondary sanctions. Whatever other options the U.S. may consider, it will no doubt continue its campaign to keep shipping lanes open while it tightens the economic screws. It could also escalate the conflict in a variety of ways, as President Trump threatened in his UN address.
The United States can increase its targeted killings of Iranian leadership. The U.S. killed hundreds of al-Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS) leaders and cadre during the Global War on Terrorism (as well as Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force). These efforts degraded the groups’ command and control capabilities, but they continued to operate. It is not clear that killing another layer of Iranian leaders would significantly change the situation, unless the killings were sustained. Some have argued that the killing of Iran’s top leaders at the outset of the war in February ushered in an even less compromising leadership. We will return to this point at the end.
The United States could initiate a joint U.S. and Saudi campaign in Yemen. Saudi Arabia requested substantial U.S. military support for operations against the Houthi rebels who now control most of the coast along the straits into the Red Sea. Despite the risk of alienating an important ally that has provided military support to American efforts against Iran, the U.S. rejected the Saudi request.
U.S. rejection may reflect America’s assessment of the situation. The Saudis have been militarily involved in Yemen’s civil war since 2015 and have not managed to quell the Houthi rebellion, which has continued to gain strength. The Yemeni government forces have repeatedly proved ineffectual. Moreover, U.S. intervention would not solve the Iranian issue or open the Strait of Hormuz, and American supplies of some critical munitions are reportedly low. (The UK has offered limited air refueling assistance to the Saudi campaign.)
As it did in the campaign against ISIS, the U.S. could attempt to assemble a coalition to conduct a continuing bombing campaign against Iran. This could target a broader array of infrastructure, although Iranian civilians will suffer most, and Iran, as it has already demonstrated, will find ways to retaliate against America’s Gulf partners. The American rejection of Saudi’s request for assistance in Yemen makes a coalition campaign less likely. It would most likely be a unilateral operation.
More ambitiously, as it did in the First Gulf War, the United States could try to assemble a U.S. air and ground coalition, perhaps including Kurdish and other forces aimed at seizing enough territory in Iran to re-open the Strait of Hormuz. The problem is that it will take months to assemble the force and put in place the logistics basing necessary to support the operation; it cannot be done from Diego Garcia. It also cannot be done secretly, giving Iran time to put pressure, including military attacks, sabotage, and terrorist operations against countries hosting the supply depots. The United States did not seek to create a broad coalition before initiating hostilities, and most European governments will not join.
The United States learned a great deal about supporting proxy forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. It could increase support for a Kurdish force to open a front in Iran’s north. The idea is not to support Kurdish separatism, but to create a sanctuary for fleeing Iranians. A U.S.-protected zone would facilitate the creation of an Iranian rebel force that can then advance on the ground with U.S. air support.
This could be done more quickly and less expensively than assembling a large expeditionary force. Iran has more than 90 million people, including many from various religious and ethnic identities oppressed by the government. Infantry soldiers can be trained in weeks. Higher-ranking Iranian officers can be incentivized to defect.
The operation’s success would depend on the willingness and ability of Iranians to join a resistance movement. In 2014, the U.S. was able to assemble and support a Kurdish effort against ISIS, but earlier U.S. efforts to support a secular rebel force to bring down Assad failed. The thought of fracturing Iran on behalf of an outside power could alienate many ethnic Persians who do not support the regime. And it could produce an adverse reaction. Iraq’s invasion of Iran in the 1980s galvanized Iranians.
And promises of sustained U.S. support may be heavily discounted. In 1991, the U.S. encouraged Kurdish and Shia rebellions after the Gulf War, but did not intervene when Saddam Hussein brutally crushed them, and after dismantling ISIS’s caliphate, the U.S. abandoned its Kurdish allies in Iraq and Syria.
A further danger with these more ambitious plans is that, faced with an existential threat, the Iranian regime can inflict terrible damage on the neighboring Gulf states by attacking desalination plants and oil and gas infrastructure. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) even operates nuclear power plants. Even now, there are probably diehards in the IRGC who are preparing, or have already prepared, Götterdämmerung scenarios.
Annihilation. In his recent address to the United Nations General Assembly, President Trump has tabled his own stark choice: “Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild a far greater country than it ever was before … Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic … drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”
While the rhetoric is threatening, the Gulf states Washington would depend on to expand its military operations against the Islamic Republic might read the President’s message differently. They could interpret the ambiguity as signaling an equal readiness to cut a deal, leaving them exposed to greater danger as U.S. partners. Just hours after his speech, President Trump told reporters that U.S. officials had a “very good” three-hour meeting with Iranian leaders.
There are other indicators: In September, the State Department shifted $52 million in foreign military assistance from the Middle East to Latin America. The sum is not great, but it indicates a shift in strategic priorities as the U.S. ramps up its determination to take down Latin America’s drug cartels. As much as America’s Gulf partners may despise Iran, they could calculate that the lesser of two evils is to cut their own deals first with Iran.
The United States has not stuck to a consistent message about its goals for this war. That makes it difficult to evaluate alternate strategies. Each option entails costs and comes with unpredictable consequences. The difficulty the U.S. faces in Iran is translating the powerful military blows it has inflicted on Iran into a lasting political outcome. Absent a clear idea of where the goal posts are makes it even harder to measure the benefits.
Meanwhile, Israel has its own security concerns, and no doubt its own set of options, but it does not have the resources to sustain an intense military campaign against Iran.
What may happen next?
Scenarios of what may happen differ from options. The most likely scenario for the near-term future seems to be more of the same — the continuation of a protracted low-intensity conflict punctuated by escalations that are calibrated to avoid the resumption of full-scale hostilities.
Alternatively, we could see a deal that leaves the Iranian regime intact, perhaps with additional incentives to facilitate Iran’s rebuilding in return for reopening the Strait of Hormuz and persuading the Houthis not to interfere with commercial shipping in the Red Sea. In other words, a return to the status quo ante bellum.
In response to President Trump’s threat to annihilate Iran, President Masoud Pezeshkian delivered a defiant response, stating that Iran will never bow its head. However, he also said that Iran remains open to negotiations, and within hours of the speech, Iran proposed a ceasefire to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and renew negotiations.
Despite his positive characterization of the earlier talks between Iranian and U.S. officials on the sidelines of the General Assembly meeting, President Trump rejected the Iranian proposal, saying he was open to a deal, but not to the one the Iranians offered.
This was not surprising as the Iranian proposal demanded more concessions from the U.S. than the memorandum of understanding between the two countries reached earlier in the year, and Iran’s economic situation has since worsened. Crude oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz have increased, and more oil shipments are moving through pipelines, although these remain below normal pre-war flows. President Trump reportedly told U.S. officials that he anticipates renewing bombing of Iran after the U.S. midterm elections on November 3.
That raises a third possible scenario — a brief resumption of intense U.S. military operations calculated to accelerate stalled negotiations. This has historical precedent in U.S. President Richard Nixon’s decision in December 1972 to order the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong Harbor in North Vietnam. The U.S. and North Vietnam had already been negotiating for months. The U.S. wanted to withdraw from South Vietnam, but Hanoi refused to accept the concessions on the table. The bombing campaign was intense, but it lasted just 11 days, and its effect on the North Vietnamese negotiating position is debated. Less than a month later, the U.S. and North Vietnam signed the agreement ending the war.
During the protracted negotiations between the U.S. and North Vietnam, the U.S. interpreted Hanoi’s shifting posture as reflecting struggles between hawks and doves in its ruling politburo. This was a mistake. Hanoi’s shifts reflected a strategy of fighting while talking in which negotiations are not an alternative to war but a continuation of the war by other means. In the half century since the Vietnam War, warfare itself has increasingly become a matter of manipulating perceptions. President Trump understands this as well as his Iranian adversaries.
This does not mean there are no tensions among those making decisions in Tehran. Iran’s actions over the last seven months suggest that there are those who, in order to prevent total economic collapse, may be more open to diplomacy but who must also deal with diehards concentrated in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. They will continue to be a threat.
Creating chaos could create new dangers
The death of Iran’s leaders and subsequent war are likely to have increased the IRGC’s influence, although it does not have a monopoly on power. A complete collapse of political authority in Iran does not mean the fanatics will take over the reins of government. It could mean that they will become even more autonomous actors, less subject to government surveillance and control, and therefore even more dangerous. My colleague, and Executive Director of The Soufan Center, Colin Clarke pointed out last April that a failed state can lead to an insurgency that lasts for years. As the United States seeks to end the threat posed by the Iranian government, creating anarchy raises new threats. That brings us back to doomsday scenarios.
Brian Michael Jenkins is a pioneer in research on contemporary terrorism and asymmetric warfare.
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