Trump has privately shown serious interest in U.S. ground troops in Iran

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has privately expressed serious interest in deploying U.S. troops on the ground in Iran, according to two U.S. officials, a former U.S. official and another person familiar with the conversations.

Trump discussed the idea of ​​deploying ground troops with Republican aides and officials outside the White House, while laying out his vision of a postwar Iran in which Iranian uranium is secure and in which the United States and a new Iranian regime cooperate on oil production in the same way as the United States and Venezuela, the sources said.

The president’s comments expressing serious interest in deploying ground troops did not focus on a full-scale ground invasion of Iran, but rather on the idea of ​​a small contingent of U.S. troops that would be used for specific strategic purposes, said the U.S. officials, the former U.S. official and the person familiar with the discussions. They said Trump made no decisions or gave orders regarding ground troops.

“This story is based on speculation from anonymous sources who are not part of the president’s national security team and which are clearly not being considered in these discussions,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “President Trump always and wisely keeps all options open, but anyone who tries to insinuate that he favors one option or another proves that he has no real seat at the table. »

Publicly, Trump has not ruled out sending American “boots” to Iran, even though the war has so far only consisted of an air campaign. His private discussions of the idea show that a president may be more willing to consider taking such a step than his public comments on the matter so far suggest. Any deployment of American troops to Iran could increase the scale and scope of the war – and increase the risks to American forces.

Since the start of the war on Saturday, six American service members have been killed and 18 others injured in Iranian counterattacks, according to the Pentagon.

Trump privately explained to aides and Republican officials outside the White House that his ideal outcome in Iran was similar to the dynamic emerging between the United States and Venezuela since U.S. special forces captured Nicolás Maduro in January, the current and former U.S. officials said. In post-Maduro Venezuela, the United States supported a new president, Delcy Rodríguez, on the condition that she implement policies that Trump views as favorable to the United States, including that the United States benefit from Venezuela’s oil production.

The president said in an interview with the New York Post this week: “I have no yaps when it comes to the troops on the ground.” He said that while other presidents have ruled out sending troops on the ground, “I say I probably don’t need them.” [or] ‘if they were necessary.’

Foreign policy experts have proposed different scenarios in which the president might choose to deploy U.S. troops on the ground in Iran.

“You could imagine them doing some sort of special operations insertion if there were targets that they absolutely had to eliminate or reduce but that weren’t amenable to bombing,” said Joel Rayburn, a former Trump administration official and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “It’s the kind of thing where you do an insertion, you attack a target or lead a raid, and then you come out.”

But Rayburn said such a scenario was very different from what most Americans imagine when they consider deploying ground troops or putting “boots on the ground,” and that he had so far not seen the conditions emerging that would require that measure.

Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran program at the Washington-based think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said that in the event of the collapse of the Iranian regime, American forces could be used on the ground to try to facilitate a dynamic between the United States and Iran like Venezuela or to help track Iran’s stockpile of uranium, which is believed to be buried under some of its nuclear sites.

“You don’t want this to become a failed state nuclear bazaar,” Taleblu said of Iran.

Nate Swanson, senior fellow and director of the Iran Strategy Project at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, D.C., said the United States may rethink its military options if Iran “thinks it can win a war of attrition.” Such a scenario could lead the president to deploy ground forces in Iran or to arm opponents of the Iranian regime. Trump is considering whether to arm the regime’s opponents.

In an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Trump suggested that he is not seriously considering a ground invasion of Iran at this time. He said he wants new leadership in Iran that he approves of and said he expects the war, which began Saturday, to last four to five weeks, while leaving open the possibility that it could continue indefinitely.

Leavitt said Wednesday that U.S. ground troops are an option that remains on the table for the president, even though they are “not part of the plan for this period of operation.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told NBC News’ Tom Llamas on Thursday that Iran is ready to welcome U.S. ground troops. “We are waiting for them,” Araghchi said, adding that “we are confident that we can face them, and it would be a big disaster for them.”

“We prepared ourselves to face any scenario,” Araghchi said.