The Trump Administration is also considering whether to send air and naval forces to Iran to help secure safe passage for oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran closed in response to the war, Reuters reported, a move that would likely involve sending American troops to the nation’s shoreline.
Trump earlier this month refused to rule out the possibility of sending ground troops to Iran. In an interview with the New York Post just a few days after the U.S. and Israel launched the initial strikes on Iran that started the war, Trump said that he would be open to deploying American ground troops to Iran “if they were necessary.”
“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground—like every President says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Trump told the Post. “I say, ‘probably don’t need them’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’”
When asked earlier this month whether there were U.S. troops on the ground in Iran, Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, said no, but went on to say that it would be “foolishness” to expect government officials to publicly disclose “exactly how far we’ll go.”