‘He wants Hormuz open,’ one U.S. official told Axios. ‘If he has to take Kharg Island to make it happen, that’s going to happen.’
Throughout much of Donald Trump’s career in politics, Washington insiders speculated that the president was poised like few others in the GOP to engineer a “Nixon to China” moment when it came to immigration.
Just as Richard Nixon’s anti-communist bona fides were so sterling that only he could orchestrate a diplomatic opening with the People’s Republic without being accused by his right flank of being a secret fellow traveler, Trump’s anti-illegal immigration views were unquestionable. If he got behind a compromise immigration reform bill, the thinking went, he could drag his party with him and neutralize the issue.
It was not to be. But the “Nixon to China” framework, shorthand for a form of Clintonian triangulation with some personalist elements that only one man can realistically engineer, is useful. If there is an opening for Trump along those lines, it might be his unique ability to reacclimate the snakebit American right to the utility of “boots on the ground” in wartime.
Trump himself already seems convinced, if Axios’s reporting is accurate. The president is reportedly readying a Marine expeditionary force with the possible aim of seizing Kharg Island, a roughly eight-square-mile energy transshipment hub off the Iranian coast in the Persian Gulf.
Tactically, such an operation would have merit. U.S. air and naval forces are steadily depleting Iran’s capacity to project power into the Gulf, the threat of which has closed the Strait of Hormuz to all but Iran-friendly maritime traffic. That mission is proceeding successfully apace, but not with the alacrity demanded by those who have absorbed the pain of rising energy costs. Taking the island from which Iran exports 90 percent of its petroleum products off the board could theoretically hasten, if not Iranian capitulation, a significant strategic recalibration. After all, that’s Tehran’s lifeblood, too.
“He wants Hormuz open,” one U.S. official told Axios. “If he has to take Kharg Island to make it happen, that’s going to happen.” Another framed the prospect of an amphibious landing on Kharg in almost moral terms. “We’ve always had boots on the ground in conflicts under every president, including Trump,” that official observed. “I know this is a fixation in the media, and I get the politics, but the president is going to do what’s right.”
The “politics” to which that official referred is the American public’s measurable distaste for the prospect of deploying combat troops to Iranian soil. A Quinnipiac University survey showed that only 20 percent of registered voters supported an expeditionary force. CNN’s pollsters found that just 12 percent of voters did not oppose troop deployments in this war. Just 7 percent of respondents to a recent Reuters poll backed “boots on the ground.”
The mood among Republicans, the vast majority of whom support the war in its current form, is a little warmer toward the prospect of troop deployments. How warm? That depends on the poll.
Among Republican respondents in CNN’s survey, 27 percent backed ground troops. Thirty-seven percent of GOP voters said the same in Quinnipiac’s survey. In a poll conducted by the left-leaning outfit Data for Progress, which found that fully two-thirds of all voters oppose troop deployments, Republicans were split on the issue at 48 percent apiece.
The numbers among Republicans are all over the map, but opinion surveys suggest that GOP voters are at least willing to be persuaded by the president. It would, therefore, be wise for the president to try persuading the public to his way of thinking on this war — something he’s conspicuously declined to do with the solemnity this moment demands.
Trump did not ready the nation for the commitments he was making to the Middle East, nor did he solicit their support for the sacrifices that would be expected of them. If the war is destined to include a ground component, it would serve the president well to be honest about what that next phase could entail.
That’s where Nixon comes in. Trump may be better positioned than anyone else in American politics to remedy the lingering effects of Iraq War Syndrome. The president’s allies are correct insofar as Trump himself has not been shy about deploying U.S. ground forces to hostile engagements, albeit with small footprints. But he’s also spent the better part of a decade arguing that most (all?) of his predecessors were reckless when sending U.S. forces off to fight “dumb” wars.
Whatever else the public knows about Trump, they know that his instincts are to use ground forces sparingly and with discrete objectives, if at all. Even if most voters are immune to the president’s powers of persuasion, such as they are, Republicans are listening. That’s a base from which Trump can build a case for the American project in Iran.
The polling indicates, however, that an intimidating majority of voters are skeptical of, if not outright hostile to, that sort of deployment. Trump may prefer to stay his current course: Strike first and ask for the public’s buy-in later. Of all the many risks associated with deploying combat forces to Iran, that might be the riskiest of all.