Despite clearly intentionally leaked reports about top American military officials briefing US President Donald Trump on new escalatory and potentially imminent military options versus Iran, all signs from Israeli and American sources to The Jerusalem Post are that the near future will see more of the current game of chicken.
While the leaks seem to be presenting Trump's being briefed on these potential "new" options for attacking Iran to influence it to make more nuclear and other concessions in the standoff as a change, all of these plans have been on the table since early March.
They are not new.
Rather, despite repeated opportunities to order the execution of any of the multiple options, Trump has preferred to avoid the additional risk they entail, sources have indicated.
He opted for a unilateral ceasefire on April 7, but received no assurances of any concessions from Iran.
The calculus was and is relatively simple: Trump was hemorrhaging political support once the war went past its early days of euphoria. As days of war became weeks, large majorities of the American public, and even an increasing number of Republicans, opposed the war over the spike in gas prices.
They also opposed the US fighting in the Middle East for any extended period (as opposed to June 2025, when the US was involved for only one day), which can be framed as a "war of choice" for Washington (though it was more pressing for Israel).
Gas prices are still far above their pre-war levels. If they do not go down in the coming months, nearly all predictions are that the Republican Party will be hammered in the US midterm elections.
But at least for the coming months, if there is no war and there are no scenes of continued chaos in the Middle East, the opposition will be less intense in the short term, and the prospect of bringing gas prices down in time to impact the November elections remains intact.
Nothing has really changed since Trump decided to end the war with no concessions, and then decided to extend his deadlines and the ceasefire on two separate occasions without any stable concessions.
In fact, the latest leaks probably signal more desperation to try anything to get the Iranians to make some concessions than anything else.
Negotiations are stalled.
Iran attempting to outwait Trump
Trump thinks the Iranians will make concessions as the blockade of Hormuz pushes their economy to collapse even more than it already has.
Iran thinks it can outwait Trump.
Their rationale is that even if the daily economic harm to Iranians is worse than it is to Americans, they believe their economic pain threshold, after decades of sanctions, is far higher than Americans' patience with the price of gas.
Trump does not want to go back to full war, and the game of chicken over Hormuz has not yet moved the Iranians, so he wants to scare them more into blinking.
The problem is that all of Trump's actions are blinking first before the Iranians have spoken louder than such repeated leaks.
Even after the US military's impressive rescue of its shot-down F-15 weapons officer airman from deep within Iranian territory, requiring hours of searches and a relatively large-scale special ground forces deployment, he declined to order any large ground forces moves.
Why not?
Top Israeli and American officials have painted a challenging picture for all of these scenarios.
Although Iran had a general idea where the US airmen were during the above operation, they did not know exactly.
In contrast, Iran knows exactly where the US would need to use ground forces to achieve certain aims related to Kharg Island or the Strait of Hormuz.
This means that it would be far more difficult for the US to achieve surprise in such strategic invasions, given that they would be constrained to known set locations, rather than searching for a single US soldier in a concealed area.
For the rescue of the F-15 airmen, Iran's forces could not pool themselves in the right spot, because they did not know where it was.
The opposite would be true with Kharg or Hormuz.
True, American forces could target any Iranian forces who were out in the open, but the Islamic regime could hide other forces until the right moment came to ambush any arriving American forces.
In addition, the Islamic regime knows where it would need to send reinforcements.
Once American troops were in play, it would also likely be more challenging for US aerial units to target Iran's reinforcements as they raced into the area, lest they harm their fellow American ground forces.
Next, the 100-man commando force from the airmen rescue was large in a sense, but could still be shifted rapidly from place to place with little exposure.
In contrast, when thousands of American soldiers are transported on slow naval ships to a specific location, they will likely be more exposed to missile and drone strikes while on their way.
Another critical question is how long US forces would need to stay in one location to remove Iranian threats so as to restore maritime shipping lanes.
Here, the presumption is far more than hours, and possibly weeks or months.
In such a case, the Islamic regime would have plenty of time and resources to ambush Americans stuck in a stagnant position, whether using their own ground troops or various aerial threats.
Even if American forces appeared to succeed, if only a few Iranian drones or cruise missiles evaded US detection, they could damage one or two ships, which might try to pass through the Straits.
If this occurred, the greater strategic goal of opening the Straits would fail despite US success on the ground.
Plan to secure Iran's enriched uranium is most difficult option
The last ground operation being discussed, inserting ground forces to secure or destroy Iran's 60% enriched uranium deep under rubble at Isfahan and likely additional facilities, would be the hardest of all.
Special heavy-duty digging vehicles would need to be brought into the area, along with nuclear science specialists, with a massive number of ground and aerial forces surrounding them to provide security.
No one knows how long this mission will take, as the Iranians themselves have not yet succeeded in digging out the uranium more than 10 months after Israeli and American attacks on Iranian nuclear sites left it covered in rubble.
Would it take several months? Would it take longer if the forces started digging and then realized they needed to bring in other kinds of equipment? Or might there be a lucky way to more quickly destroy or dilute the uranium?
Regardless of those multiple scenarios, American ground troops would be in extended danger, and there is no guarantee that the mission might not fail with Iranian pressure interfering.
US Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, who has tremendous influence with Trump on security matters, has been against such risky moves from the start, which is one reason they did not happen earlier.
In fact, the only way Trump might seriously consider these moves would be if he were fully convinced that he would lose the game of chicken with Iran and that the price of losing that game would be greater than the risk he would take with these unpredictable moves.
Trump may reach that stage at some point.
Former CENTCOM chief Gen. Kenneth "Frank" McKenzie Jr. told the Post in an interview on April 9 that there are additional options, such as "Maybe we don’t need to put people on the shore and do not need to occupy" the Straits. "We can just make it impossible on those islands" for Iran to operate.
He said the US could "control those islands by fire – if the Iranians show up on the island, we kill them. We do intrusive overhead monitoring. Or carry out temporary raids. We go onto the land to destroy a missile launch site," or other threat, but then leave, such that American troops would be less vulnerable to an ambush afterward, compared to leaving a stagnant occupying force in place.
But despite public leaks about re-briefings of long-standing plans, all signs from Israeli and American sources are that Trump is not yet near the stage, and that he will likely wait at least a few weeks to see how the game of chicken plays out before he would seriously consider such major risks.