Iran’s Control of Hormuz Is Driving the U.S. Toward Ground War

Robert Pape argues that the campaign’s defining failure is not simply that it did not topple Iran’s government. It is that Iran emerged with practical control over the Strait of Hormuz—a position he considers more consequential than the destruction inflicted by air strikes.

His timeline places the opening “regime change bombing” on February 28 and Iran’s control of Hormuz by March 2 or 3. Iran, he says, went from being a declining regional power to holding a means of influencing oil flows, military balances, and neighboring states. Before the war, Iran neither controlled the strait nor charged ships to transit it. Afterwards, Pape says, it could threaten vessels moving through it, including ships that had switched off their transponders.

Pape describes Iran as having “moved from survival to ambition.” He says the United States struck the Iranian leadership with extraordinary force: the Supreme Leader, roughly 137 top leaders, and much of the country’s senior political and military leadership were killed. Yet the regime endured. A displayed community note stated that Iran’s Assembly of Experts subsequently named Mojtaba Khamenei, the previous Supreme Leader’s son, as the new Supreme Leader, signaling political continuity during the conflict.

Pape treats that outcome as consistent with the historical model he says he developed over two decades: air power alone does not topple regimes. The first effort was leadership-targeted bombing; the next was six weeks of wider bombing; then came a two-month blockade. Each was a form of coercive punishment intended to induce Iran to relinquish its grip on Hormuz. None resolved the basic problem: how to make Iran give up a position it had successfully seized.

Control of Hormuz, Pape argues, means influence over roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply. That is not merely prospective toll revenue. It is a base from which Iran could build military power, diplomatic influence, and a wider sphere of influence. Iran does not, in this reading, regard the strait as a bargaining chip that can simply be bought back. It sees the strait as an asset from which a more durable regional order can be built.

The escalation model Pape displayed makes the logic explicit. Its inverted pyramid begins with a “limited strike,” moves through retaliation and further escalation, and widens into economic crisis and entrenched conflict. The model’s central proposition is that a quick operation creates pressure for a larger one when the adversary does not yield. Pape believes the conflict is now at the point where economic consequences are making physical action to retake at least part of Hormuz more politically tempting.

The fork, in his account, is stark: Washington can accept Iranian control of Hormuz and the strategic and political consequences that follow, or try to reverse that control physically. Bombing, blockade, and the memorandum of understanding have not supplied a stable exit.

Pape’s reading of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding explains why a signed agreement did not end the fighting. Steven Bartlett raises the apparent contradiction directly: Vice President JD Vance had described an agreement that was about to end the war, Iran signed it, and within weeks the parties were again exchanging attacks.

Pape distinguishes between the memorandum’s visible financial inducements and its strategic provisions. Article 6, displayed during the interview, committed the United States and regional partners to develop a reconstruction and economic-development plan worth at least $300 billion, with the implementation mechanism to be finalized within 60 days. He calls that promise “funny money” from Iran’s perspective: a future offer that did not address the immediate distribution of power.

The text on screen matters because Pape’s interpretation rests on its specific language, not simply on the fact of an agreement.

Article 5 was, for Pape, the clearest expression of the issue. Iran promised safe passage for 60 days, without charge—but not permanent free passage. The text did not assign the United States a formal role in setting future terms. Pape says the agreement consequently positioned Iran and Oman to determine subsequent fees and conditions.

That is why he calls the memorandum a roadmap to Iranian regional hegemony: not immediate domination of every state in the Middle East, but emergence as the most powerful state in the Persian Gulf and a broader regional power center. Iran signed because, in his reading, it received an agreement recognizing the leverage it had gained in the war.

The argument extends beyond Hormuz itself. Pape says Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates began bypassing the strait through pre-existing pipeline routes: Saudi output of roughly four to five million barrels per day to the Red Sea and nearly two million barrels per day from the UAE through Fujairah. Those adaptations reduce the value of controlling a single chokepoint over time.

Iran’s answer, as Pape describes it, is a “security resistance belt” extending from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea to the Gulf. The strategic purpose would be to threaten alternate oil routes as well as Hormuz itself. In this account, Iran’s relationships with the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon are not only ideological or historical. They are operational assets: the Houthis can endanger Red Sea shipping, while Hezbollah’s position near Lebanon and Syria could threaten routes or infrastructure that bypass the Gulf.

Article 1 mattered because it sat within this wider contest. Pape argues that a U.S.-backed framework agreement locking in Israel’s military presence in Lebanon conflicted with the memorandum’s commitment to respect Lebanese territorial integrity. He identifies two other subsequent actions as violations: encouraging ships to use the southern Hormuz route without coordination with Iran, sometimes with transponders off; and conditioning the release of Iranian assets on purchases of American grain for U.S. farmers.

His conclusion is that the administration initially accepted the memorandum’s strategic loss and then tried to reverse it while retaining its immediate benefit of reopening oil flows. Iran, he argues, responded to what it viewed as an effort to bypass its control. The resumed conflict was therefore not primarily a dispute over legal wording. It was a renewed struggle over whether Iran would be allowed to turn control of Hormuz into durable regional power.

President Trump had said Iran’s air force, navy, radar, air detection, and virtually everything else had been knocked out. Yet Iran continued to hit U.S. positions and threaten shipping. Pape’s answer is that the capabilities necessary to sustain disruption are smaller, more dispersed, and harder to eliminate than the targets most readily identified from the air.

Iran began the war, he says, with thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of drones, ballistic missiles, and anti-shipping cruise missiles. Even if large portions were destroyed, it did not need every weapon to keep Hormuz dangerous. It could use saturation attacks: swarms of drones and missiles intended to overwhelm defensive systems until enough weapons get through to damage a base, vessel, or infrastructure target.

The pattern of use shifted, according to Pape. Iran initially relied heavily on intermediate-range ballistic missiles, then primarily on drones from mid-March. Israel continued to face substantial ballistic-missile attacks. More recently, he says, ballistic and sea-skimming cruise missiles had again appeared against multiple targets. He does not claim the United States is definitely running out of interceptors, but says the more plausible ammunition concern lies with defensive munitions used to shoot incoming missiles down—not with conventional bombs used by U.S. aircraft.

The difficulty is not only the number of drones. It is the geography and production base behind them. A displayed comparison placed a Shahed-136 drone beside a Ford F-150 pickup, emphasizing a weapon small enough to fit in ordinary enclosed spaces and, as Pape puts it, potentially hidden “everywhere”—in caverns, warehouses, and terrain. He compares the U.S. task to finding a truck in California.

A displayed map of southern Iran marked a 500-mile drone-and-missile launch zone spanning the coast around Bandar Abbas, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Zagros Mountains. Pape initially described the indicated area as one-and-a-half times California’s size. An on-screen correction calculated that a 500-mile-radius circle covers roughly 785,000 square miles, nearly five times California’s approximately 163,696 square miles. The correction does not alter his underlying point: the search area is vast, mountainous, and three-dimensional. Drones can be buried under terrain, facilities, and layers of concealment. Finding a launcher from the air does not mean finding every launcher.

Iran, Pape says, was also continuing to manufacture drones. He refers to leaked Pentagon estimates from April that Iran had been making 55,000 drones a year and supplying them to Russia. His point is not that the exact current stockpile is known. It is that a campaign against launchers has to contend with replenishment as well as concealment.

The distinction between military destruction and commercial confidence is crucial. The Pentagon can direct military operations; it cannot compel private shipping companies or crews to accept a risk they consider commercially or personally intolerable. Pape notes that tankers carry between 700,000 and more than one million barrels of oil. Bartlett cites an estimate that a new vessel carrying a full load is a floating asset worth about $300 million. Pape adds the practical issue: crews do not want to die, while insurers and operators cannot be assumed to treat a naval escort as a guarantee.

Iran does not need to defeat the U.S. military conventionally, in Pape’s formulation. It needs enough remaining drones, mines, missiles, and targeting capacity to make the strait unsafe enough that shipping does not resume at scale.

Pape argues that the immediate economic danger arises from the interaction of disrupted supply routes, dwindling emergency reserves, and constraints on refining—not merely closure of one waterway.

His starting point is the roughly 20 million barrels per day that he says had moved through Hormuz. Saudi and UAE pipelines initially bypassed about seven million barrels per day, leaving approximately 13 million barrels exposed to the strait’s disruption. Strategic stockpiles then supplied a temporary cushion.

Bartlett cites a U.S. release of 172 million barrels over approximately 120 days, within a coordinated release of 400 million barrels by 32 International Energy Agency members. He says the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve had fallen to roughly 300 million barrels by July 2026, its lowest level since 1983. Pape’s conclusion is not that the reserve drawdown was irrational. It delayed the crisis. But stockpiles cannot indefinitely substitute for lost flows; once drawn down, they must be replenished.

The bypass routes were then themselves put under pressure. Pape says the Houthis had shut the Red Sea area around Yanbu, a Saudi export point, on the day of the interview. In his account, this closed off the four to five million barrels per day that Saudi Arabia had been sending toward the Red Sea.

He also emphasizes that oil must be refined before it becomes gasoline or diesel. If Persian Gulf disruption impairs refinery operations or movement of refined products, the problem is not only fewer barrels of crude reaching markets. It becomes a shortage of usable fuel. Pape says the Gulf accounts for a substantial share of global refining capacity, estimating the affected share at roughly one-quarter to one-third while explicitly acknowledging that he does not know the exact figure. He links that strain to Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries, arguing that the combined disruption could meaningfully limit refining capacity.

President Trump’s reported G7 warning provides Pape’s political clock. Bartlett quotes Trump as saying reserves would run out in about four weeks, supply would become very low, and there would be a point at which “you wouldn’t be able to get it” and “it would be bedlam.” Pape reads that statement as a candid explanation for why Trump signed the memorandum: an attempt to avert an oil shock.

Pape’s concern is that the administration has not settled on durable accommodation, while its military measures have not restored commercial confidence. Economic strain therefore becomes an incentive for a more dramatic demonstration of action before it becomes politically decisive.

Pape does not believe the United States can force the Strait of Hormuz fully open through its current strategy. Yet he reads the deployment posture as pointing toward a narrower mission: taking and temporarily holding a small piece of Iranian territory, potentially a port town along the southeastern coast.

He cites an estimated force of roughly 4,500 to 5,000 Marines and around 4,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne. He says naval forces, including carriers and a Marine Expeditionary Unit, were concentrated in the Gulf of Oman rather than moving through the strait itself.

The map he used to explain the deployment places the Gulf of Oman east of Hormuz, with Iran’s comparatively sparsely populated southeastern coast immediately to the north. Pape identifies Chabahar and Jask as possible objectives. He says naval guns operating from the Gulf of Oman have range to hit shore targets within about 12 miles.

Pape stresses that he is not advocating this course. He is trying to explain why the forces might be positioned there. A limited seizure could be presented as a controlled operation rather than an attempt to invade and occupy the country.

The political attraction, in his account, is its potential to produce an image of action: territory captured, American forces holding it for a week or several weeks, and a claim that the administration had fought back. It would not solve the underlying problem. Iran could ultimately redirect forces and attention toward the enclave. Nor would taking a coastal town necessarily make commercial passage through Hormuz safe.

The risks are grave. Bartlett observes that an American foothold would give Iran a target: U.S. soldiers on Iranian territory. Pape estimates that losses could run to hundreds of American dead over weeks. The operation would be politically divisive, but he argues that casualties do not necessarily immediately turn supporters against a war. Among people already committed to the fight, deaths can harden support because withdrawal may be framed as making those deaths meaningless.

Pape puts the likelihood of U.S. boots on the ground at “bordering on 70%,” potentially within a month and possibly as soon as the end of the week. That is his forecast, based on growing economic disruption and what he sees as White House pressure to demonstrate a path toward reopening Hormuz.

Pape’s warning about ground operations rests on his research into suicide attacks. He says he compiled what became the first complete dataset of suicide attacks worldwide after 9/11, seeking to understand why that attack occurred and why suicide terrorism is so lethal. He calls suicide attacks “the lung cancer of terrorism”: the category that kills more people than all other forms of terrorism combined.

His central finding is that military combat presence on territory prized by the attackers is the strongest risk factor. The issue is not simply civilian casualties from bombing, he says. Ground forces are deployed to impose political control. To local populations, that means outsiders governing territory and influencing their way of life.

Pape contrasts bombing with occupation through Afghanistan. He says the Taliban was toppled before the major suicide-terrorism campaign emerged; the campaign grew years later as foreign ground forces poured in. He similarly says his dataset predicted that a U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq would trigger the largest modern suicide-terror campaign.

A suicide attacker, he argues, is a precision-guided weapon directed by a human being: able to identify a vulnerable point in a crowd or building and choose the moment of detonation. This makes the threat different from a missile or drone attack that can be met with air defenses.

The near-term threat he fears includes a barrage of ballistic missiles at U.S. naval ships in the Gulf of Oman. Pape says Iran has recently demonstrated highly precise targeting. He does not know whether Iran can independently track moving U.S. vessels; he raises Chinese or Russian assistance as one possible explanation, not as an established fact.

He also fears a mass-casualty attack on Americans, whether troops in the Middle East or civilians elsewhere. He names commercial aviation, hotels used by businesspeople involved in pipeline projects, and places such as Aqaba as potential settings. A displayed community note said the U.S. Embassy issued a warning on July 19 about a “specific and credible threat” to Aqaba’s airport and seaport, and that Jordan intercepted missiles and drones near the city on July 22.

These are warnings, not claims of a known plot. Pape’s argument is that the risk rises sharply when the United States threatens or begins to control Iranian homeland territory. He also says such an attack need not be directly commanded by Iran: leadership rhetoric could inspire violence by others, as he believes ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s rhetoric inspired attacks including Paris in November 2015 and San Bernardino.

The political consequence, Pape cautions, could be perverse. A mass-casualty attack might deepen rather than weaken American support for escalation. The result would be two reinforcing loops: military actions creating conditions for retaliation, and retaliation generating domestic pressure for further military action.

Pape frames the period before the midterm elections as the war’s most consequential window. He does not think there is now a credible off-ramp that restores free shipping while allowing the United States to avoid a visible strategic defeat.

The memorandum could have been an off-ramp, he argues, but only if the administration had honored it. Once the United States signed it and then undermined provisions Iran treated as central, returning to the same agreement would not be credible. Earlier opportunities also passed, he says: declaring victory in the first week of March after killing Iranian leaders, or more effectively containing Israel’s military activity in Lebanon.

Politics now exerts pressure in the opposite direction. Higher fuel costs and a wider economic crisis could hurt Republicans in the midterms. Pape believes Trump sees that danger and may calculate that escalation, however unlikely to succeed militarily, offers some chance of producing a useful result before November.

His historical analogue is Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam-era choices. Pape argues that leaders may know escalation is likely to worsen a war but still choose it because immediate acceptance of defeat would damage their domestic political agenda. He sees Trump confronting a comparable choice: acknowledge Iran’s control of Hormuz and bear the political cost, or continue seeking a military development that might postpone or soften it.

Pape does not offer a deterministic electoral forecast. A global economic crisis without a mass-casualty attack would, he says, make Republican losses likely. But a mass-casualty attack against Americans could increase the odds that Trump and Republicans prevail. That is a forecast about political response, not a claim that such an attack is expected or imminent.

If Democrats won one or both chambers and were strongly anti-war, Pape says Congress could use its spending power to stop funding the war, as it did in Vietnam in 1974. That would be a route out before the conflict hardened into what he calls the “forever war” stage.

Bartlett counters that a president may resist through vetoes, Article II claims of commander-in-chief authority, emergency transfer powers, and reallocation of existing Pentagon funds. Pape agrees that this would define a constitutional crisis: Congress believing it has the power to limit the war, and the president believing he has the power to continue it.

For Pape, the danger extends beyond foreign policy. He describes a convergence between domestic political strain and an international crisis. His analogy is the 1960s: an unpopular war alongside mass demonstrations, political violence, terrorism, assassinations, and a destabilizing election environment. A displayed community note corrected one detail in the discussion: Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s “shoot to kill” order followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, while clashes between police and anti-war protesters came later at the August Democratic National Convention. Pape’s larger point is that domestic political conflict and foreign war do not remain separate systems. They can intensify one another.

Pape places China and Russia in the background of a conflict that he believes could become more costly the longer it continues.

He says China does not want global instability, but also does not want Iran to emerge “smashed.” Beijing is unlikely, in his assessment, to intervene forcefully with its own military. Pape recounts Xi Jinping asking Trump at a summit whether the United States, as Xi characterized it, would fall into the Thucydides Trap: a theory that conflict becomes more likely when a rising power threatens an established power.

Russia, Pape argues, sees an opportunity to squeeze Europe economically. He says Ukraine has recently put increasing pressure on Russian supply lines around Crimea, and that Vladimir Putin may increase pressure on Europe as the Iran-linked economic shock grows. Pape says this could make it harder for European governments to meet a commitment to provide Ukraine with an additional $80 billion.

Neither point changes his central prognosis. China has an interest in avoiding a broader global shock but does not, in Pape’s view, have an incentive to rescue the United States from its position. Russia may find that an energy and economic shock makes European support for Ukraine harder to sustain.

Asked what Trump’s actual objective is, Pape answers: a symbolic victory that can last a week or two and demonstrate that the United States fought back. He sees that as an electoral and political objective, not a strategy capable of producing regional stability.

He says he has never met Trump and does not claim insight into the president’s private thinking. His analysis rests on observable incentives and public decisions. But he considers Trump stuck: accepting Iranian control of Hormuz would be an immediate, public defeat; escalating militarily risks a longer and more destructive failure.

If asked for advice focused on the next three months and the midterms, Pape says, “don’t call me.” He would instead want to design a multi-year strategy to build a more stable balance of power in the region. The objection is not that American political interests and American security must always conflict. It is that a strategy organized around a president’s near-term electoral needs is likely to intensify the escalation trap rather than solve it.

Pape’s forecast is conditional but clear in direction. Over the next few months, he expects the United States to cross the threshold into a ground operation—on an island or part of Iran’s coast—as economic pressure grows and as Trump seeks tangible evidence of a plan to reopen Hormuz. It may be symbolic rather than effective. It may not restore shipping. But Pape believes the incentives driving escalation will make such a move increasingly likely.

Bartlett closes by emphasizing that more than 90 million Iranians are caught in a war they did not choose, living with bombing, uncertainty, and the prospect that foreign troops may enter their country. Pape says Iranian students at the University of Chicago ask him about relatives still in Iran. His answer is bleak: real hope may be five or 10 years away, and escalation pushes the timeline closer to 10.