BREAKING: Trump Threatens Iran Invasion

Summary

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The Bulwark: BREAKING: Trump Threatens Iran Invasion

Date: June 11, 2026
Guests: Ben Parker, Mark Hertling, Matt (Technician)
Theme: Immediate analysis of President Trump’s public threat to invade Iran’s Kharg Island, examining the strategic, military, and political rationale and implications.

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Episode Overview

This breaking-news edition of The Bulwark’s "Command Post" offers real-time reaction and analysis of President Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. might invade Iran’s Kharg Island to seize control of its oil exports. Ben Parker and General Mark Hertling discuss the strategic significance of Kharg, historical context, military feasibility, and why the plan is angering and alarming to experts.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is Kharg Island & Why Does it Matter?

Timestamps: 00:55–04:49

• Geography & Location

  • Kharg Island lies 20 miles off Iran’s coast in Bashir Province, northwest of the Strait of Hormuz.
  • Size: Around 5 miles long, 3 miles wide (10–20 sq km).
  • One of few Gulf islands with fresh water, and surrounded by deep water for supertankers ([01:32]).

• Oil Infrastructure

  • Handles about 90% of Iran's crude oil exports, with facilities for 7 million barrels/day ([02:14]).
  • Storage capacity: Over 30 million barrels in large tanks.
  • "If the Strait of Hormuz is Iran’s front door, then Kharg Island is its cash register." – Matt ([03:11]).

• Military Significance

  • Hosts an air defense hub and IRGC forces.
  • Sits amid Iran’s offshore oil fields and major shipping routes.
  • "It could be called, Ben, as we talked about the other day, a center of gravity using the Clausewitzian term." – Mark Hertling ([04:07]).

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2. Historical Precedent: Lessons from the Iran-Iraq War

Timestamps: 04:49–06:42

• During the Iran-Iraq war, Kharg Island was repeatedly attacked by Iraq in the so-called "Tanker War."

• Despite sustained attacks, Saddam “never achieved the strategic effect he wanted,” i.e., Iranian capitulation ([06:31]).

• Economic pressure alone did not force regime change or compliance.

  "The lesson of attacking an enemy’s economic center of gravity can create certainly pressure... But pressure alone doesn’t necessarily produce capitulation."
  — Mark Hertling ([06:45])

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3. Analysis: Trump’s Strategy and Its Flaws

Timestamps: 05:49–09:09

• Viability of Invasion

  • U.S. can theoretically seize Kharg, but long-term value and outcome are questionable.
  • Key question: Why? What does seizing Kharg achieve, beyond economic damage?

• Trump’s Mindset

  • Sees conflict through "exclusively economic, even financial terms" ([07:29]).
  • Assumes economic pain translates directly to regime vulnerability—experts argue this is simplistic.
  • Ben Parker: "If economic pressure were enough to bring down an opponent, then there would be no North Korea today. There would be no Iranian regime today." ([08:05])

• Military Advisers' View

  • Kharg is a vulnerable but not decisive military objective.
  • Iran’s leadership, missiles, and broader capability would survive.
  • "It could be a strategic pressure point, but it’s not a war ending objective." – Mark Hertling ([09:09])

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4. Risks and Downsides of a Kharg Island Operation

Timestamps: 11:11–15:21

• Military Vulnerability

  • Any occupation force would be highly exposed to Iranian missiles and drones, which have significant range.
  • "You have to defend... in 360 degrees. And the President has made the situation worse if he actually orders this attack by telegraphing it." – Ben Parker ([11:58])

  "Imagine if Franklin Roosevelt had said, three days before D-Day, 'By the way, we might invade Normandy.'"
  — Ben Parker ([12:31])

• Regional Escalation

  • Seizing Kharg could widen conflict, involving neighboring countries (Kuwait, Iraq, Turkey).
  • "Look at the rest of the Iranian territory. It’s three times larger than the nation of Iraq where we spent 10 years." – Mark Hertling ([12:59])

• Logistical & Strategic Complexity

  • Initial occupation could be done, but holding the island and achieving broader objectives is a "quagmire".
  • No historical precedent for such a quick or easy outcome.

  "This is going to be... Quagmire, this is going to be difficult and it may not be the right approach."
  — Mark Hertling ([15:17])

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5. The Trump/Putin Comparison, Delusion, and Escalation

Timestamps: 15:21–End

• Clip from Trump (Fox News):

  "We dropped $250 million worth of bombs on them last night. You know, the whole thing is crazy. But, and they're really in submission. They just don't know it yet. Okay. To be honest with you, they just don't know it yet."
  — President Trump ([15:33])

• Ben Parker:
  "That sounds absolutely Putin-esque to me. 'Oh, this is going to be over very soon…' he is not getting a realistic view of what’s happening." ([15:59])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Kharg as “Cash Register”:

  "If the Strait of Hormuz is Iran's front door, then Kharg Island is its cash register."
  — Matt ([03:13])

• On Ineffectiveness of Economic Pressure:

  “If economic pressure were enough to bring down an opponent, then... there would be no North Korea today.”
  — Ben Parker ([08:05])

• Frustration over Telegraphed Attacks:

  “Imagine if Franklin Roosevelt had said, three days before D-Day, 'By the way, we might invade Normandy.'”
  — Ben Parker ([12:31])

• On Military Feasibility:

  "Nothing has been finished in the first week, as the President proclaimed. This is going to be... Quagmire."
  — Mark Hertling ([15:17])

• On Trump’s Bombastic Statements:

  “They’re really in submission. They just don’t know it yet.”
  — President Trump ([15:33], Fox News clip)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:55] - Geographic/capacity breakdown of Kharg Island
• [04:49] - Iran-Iraq War context and lessons
• [06:45] - Limits of economic/military pressure
• [09:09] - Analysis of strategic objectives and vulnerabilities
• [11:11] - Risks and logistics of a putative invasion
• [12:31] - Criticism of Trump’s public telegraphing of war plans
• [15:33] - Trump’s Fox News statement and critique

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Tone & Takeaways

The episode is deeply skeptical and critical of Trump’s logic, strategy, and public handling of a potential military campaign. Both military and journalistic panelists highlight the operational risks, likely futility, and the dangers of reducing warfare to simple economic pain, especially in the face of a resilient adversary. There is particular anger at the cavalier and vague manner with which Trump discusses war plans—a stark warning about the stakes and the lessons of history.

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Transcript

[Ben Parker]

Hey, I'm Ben Parker from the Bulwark.

[Mark Hertling]

And I'm Mark Hertling from the Bulwark. And we've got some real live breaking news right now, and we hope to talk a little bit about Carg Island.

[Ben Parker]

Yeah, this is a breaking news edition of Command Post, because just a few minutes before we went live here, the President of the United States announced that maybe possibly at some indeterminate point in the future, going to be invading an Iranian island, Kharg island, which is where they do most of their oil exports from in the street of Hormuz, quote, assume total control of their oil and gas markets, much like we have with Venezuela. So we've talked about this possibility before. It is. It is. Well, I'll hold on this for now, but my immediate reaction when I see this is just like pure, unadulterated anger. And I can explain why. But first, General, what do you make of this?

[Mark Hertling]

Yeah, well, you know what we might want to do, Ben, is explain to our listeners where Karg island is, what it does. And, Matt, if you can bring up

[Matt]

that map we talked about.

[Mark Hertling]

There it is. So you see the Straits of Hormu, the Strait of Hormuz, off to the right, where UAE and Iran kind of

[Matt]

intersect in that narrow body of water that's been on the news for the

[Mark Hertling]

last couple of weeks. But Carg island lies in the northern Persian Gulf. It's about 20 miles off Iran's coast in their Bashir Province, which is an

[Matt]

area that was bombed the other day.

[Mark Hertling]

It sits northwest of the Strait of

[Matt]

Hormuz, and it's about 55km away from the port. It's a coral outcrop island about 5 miles long and 3 miles wide, with a total area of roughly 10, 20 square kilometers.

[Mark Hertling]

But it's one of the few Gulf islands with fresh water.

[Matt]

It's surrounded by deep seawater, which allows the very large crude carriers, the merchant ships and supertankers, to dock directly offshore and take on their products.

[Mark Hertling]

And what's interesting is most of Iran's

[Matt]

coastline is too shallow for tanker traffic

[Mark Hertling]

to go into the coast.

[Matt]

But CARG is uniquely valuable because of this.

[Mark Hertling]

It has about 8,000 residents that live

[Matt]

on the island, although the access of those citizens is tightly controlled because of the strategic oil ports and the military facilities there. Now, let's talk a little bit about what it does. Carg handles about 90% of Iran's crude oil exports. Its loading capacity is about 7 million barrels per day. That is just unfathomable for me. I'm not a tanker expert or a shipper. But it just seems fascinating. Their storage capacity there exceeds 30 million barrels in dozens of large storage tanks, which we would be able to see on any kind of satellite photo or even in Google Maps. If you zoomed in on Carg island. And there's an old expression that I learned, and I'll tell more about this

[Mark Hertling]

in a minute,

[Matt]

if the Strait of Hormuz is Iran's front door, then Carg island is its cast register. Now, it has a lot of military folks on this island. It's an air defense hub. Now a lot of those have likely been damaged by the strikes that have already occurred. But in the past it's considered a defensive location with surface to air missile radar sites, air surveillance facility and some of the IRGC security forces, which I'm sure have been moved from there lately. But it also sits astride all of the Iranian offshore oil fields and it's right smack dab in the middle of the Northern Gulf shipping routes.

[Mark Hertling]

So all of these things contribute to

[Matt]

this importance of this island and why President Trump and the military planners would

[Mark Hertling]

focus on it, because some might even

[Matt]

call it, Ben, as we talked about the other day, a center of gravity using the Clausewitzian term. That's kind of a description of the island. And what I told Ben this morning was back in 1988 when I was part of the SAMS course at Leavenworth, which I was a young major at the time. This is before I went off to Desert Storm and we were studying the operational art in a one year additional course to the Command and General Staff College. There were 40 students in that course, all army officers that would go on to be operational planners and division planners in the Corps and the divisions in the U.S. army. Well, I've mentioned this briefly before, but one of our big exercises was a war game against Iran. And the reason it was topical for us at the time is we were getting real live information from the Iran Iraq War from 1980 to 1988. And interestingly enough, I told Ben, I pulled out an old notebook of mine in a footlocker this morning. Carg was one of Iraq's primary targets during the so called Tanker war. So for a four year period, Saddam Hussein repeatedly attacked Karak island and found it very difficult to overcome. Now that's not saying it's impossible. And I'm sure the US Military is much better than the Iraqi military was, even though Iraq's military in 1988 was the fourth largest in the world. So we might have an easier time in terms of doing things against Karg. But I think that's what we want to talk about today.

[Ben Parker]

Yeah, I want to. I mean, I am sure that if Trump gave the order, we could attack, bomb, take, and for some period of time hold Hog Island. Right. Like that is the kind of thing the American military can do. Why? Yeah, that is my big question. Trump says, oh, well, we're going to control their oil exports.

[Unidentified Technician]

Why?

[Mark Hertling]

Let's talk about what Saddam said, because he basically said the same thing back in 1984. He said he spent four years trying

[Matt]

to knock Carg island out of the war to damage Iran's economic capability.

[Mark Hertling]

So he repeatedly sank ships, reduced the Iranian exports, but he never, Saddam, never achieved the strategic effect he wanted because

[Matt]

the lesson of attacking an enemy's economic

[Mark Hertling]

center of gravity can create certainly pressure

[Matt]

on like it has against the United States.

[Mark Hertling]

But pressure alone doesn't necessarily produce capitulation. And what we know, Ben, because we've been talking about it, is Iran has had economic sanctions and pressure for probably the last three decades, and they haven't crashed yet. They're in trouble. I mean, they have some economic problems, certainly within the country, and that requires tighter control, tighter control by the Iranian government.

[Matt]

But it's something, the question you just

[Mark Hertling]

asked, why, why would we want to do this? What does it get us in terms of more pressure against the Iranian government?

[Ben Parker]

Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this a little bit, and maybe it's time to have a fuller discussion of it now based on just this one vague truth social post from the president, but also based on a lot of the ways he described this war and he's described the Strait of Hormuz and the blockade. Of the blockade. He seems to be thinking, well, which is not surprising for him. Exclusively in economic terms. I shouldn't even say economic terms. Exclusively in financial terms. He thinks that costing someone money is the way to hurt them. And that's probably projection. That is certainly true of him. And so he thinks what hurts me is what hurts other people. And I don't think that's quite true for Iran. Yes, every country's economy is important, and the economy and national security are intimately related. And so it doesn't help to have your economy weakened. But if economic pressure were enough to bring down an opponent, then there would be no North Korea today. There would be no Iranian regime today. Economic pressure cannot compel the Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons program. Economic pressure will not compel them to just say, well, I guess we're not leaders of Iran anymore. And go home. And frankly, to me, it looks like, as we discussed yesterday on our regularly scheduled command post, it looks to me like the President is out of ideas and mad and flailing. He doesn't have a goal, he's just mad. And so he's lashing out by ordering attacks, by suggesting we might do an invasion. And the part of this that. Well, I'll let you respond to that because I'm sure you have much more sophisticated thoughts. And then I'll tell you why this makes me so angry and why I'm sitting here seething.

[Mark Hertling]

No, you bring up some great points, Ben. Because if you're looking at it from a vulnerability perspective, Kharg is economically decisive because unlike other Gulf states, Iran's export infrastructure is highly concentrated there. It's one point of failure, we could call it. It's militarily vulnerable. There ain't much stuff there. I mean, even if the IRGC was still there as part of the island, it's a small location and it can be decisively taken. It is politically sensitive to most of the Gulf states specifically. I would guess that 90% of the American public have never heard of Cargill island before. But the Gulf states know about it. So it could be called a single point of failure. But I would not say it's a decisive military objective to win a war. You know, Iran's still going to possess missiles. They're still going to have the Ayatollah as the grand leader, and they're going to have an IRGC component that is making demands, and they're still going to exist. Tehran would still retain political control of the rest of a very large country and the maritime threats in the Gulf would continue. So if I were a military planner advising the president, I would say, yes, Karg is an important and it's a vulnerable point. It could be a strategic pressure point, but it's not a war ending objective. Again, going back to your original question as we started this whole thing off, what are we trying to do? What are we trying to do?

[Matt]

Kharg is an island.

[Mark Hertling]

It's the junction where geography, economics and military power intersects. It's five miles long, it's relatively small, but it can create pressure on Tehran,

[Matt]

but it doesn't automatically generate a victory, that's for sure.

[Ben Parker]

All right, so we've been talking about the, the limited possible benefits of actually taking Harg Island. And here's the part that as soon as I saw this, this post by Trump got me so angry. As you pointed out, Hag is not that far from the Iranian coast. And we're not talking about invading mainland Iran. And as we have seen, we have not been able to eliminate Iran's missile or drone capabilities. So what we're talking about, in effect, is putting American marines or soldiers, sailors, airmen on this island and then, I guess, having them sit there while Iran gets to shoot at them with missiles and drones. And we know Iranian drones have the range because these are basically the same drones that Russia is using in Ukraine, which have ranges of hundreds of kilometers or more. So, yeah, easy target.

[Mark Hertling]

The.

[Ben Parker]

It's. It's sort of a, an air defense nightmare because you have missiles coming from steep angles, drones coming from shallow angles, drones that can come from any direction. They can come, you know, they can be shot from anywhere in Iran and, and hit the, hit the island. So you have to defend, like, basically in 360 degrees. And, and the President has made the situation worse. If he does actually order this attack by telegraphing it. I mean, imagine if, if Franklin Roosevelt had said, you know, three days before D day, by the way, we might invade Normandy.

[Mark Hertling]

Right.

[Ben Parker]

He is not. It not only makes it less likely that any operation would be successful, however we define that. It also puts the lives of the people he would be ordering to carry out that order in danger. And that just frustrates me so much.

[Mark Hertling]

Yeah. Matt, could you put the map back up again, too?

[Unidentified Technician]

Ben?

[Mark Hertling]

Ben, in addition to all the things you talked about. Well, you can't much see it on the map, but Kuwait is pretty close to Kargil.

[Ben Parker]

You can see it right there on the left.

[Mark Hertling]

Yeah, you can see Kuwait. You can't see Turkey. You can't see Iraq. Those are all other, let's call them Middle Eastern states. Turkey is not quite a Middle Eastern state, but it sort of is. This could certainly widen that conflict because it would be a concentrated area. But what I want to point out is the arrow points to Kharg. Look at the rest of the Iranian territory. It's three times larger than the nation of Iraq where we spent 10 years. And if you're looking for a decisive military victory by striking one point, it gets to what you were saying a minute ago, Ben. There's a whole lot of other things that could affect any kind of military campaign by just seizing one island. You're not going to limit it to an economic victory just by seizing this oil port. The other thing that I might mention is when we were talking about doing this breaking news segment this morning, and I saw the post by the President, my immediate reaction was troop to task Whenever you establish what a mission is for forces, you have to determine how many people will have to conduct that mission. If you're only talking about carg, you could do it with probably the force limited in the Gulf right now, but what else would you need to ensure that that potential seizing and securing of an island would contribute to effects from throughout the country of Iran? It's sort of like Russia saying, hey, we're going to go into the Donbas and take that area and the rest of Ukraine is not vulnerable or not willing to fight back. And we're assuming a lot of things away that it's going to be a quick and easy war. And what we found so far is nothing has been quick and easy. Nothing has occurred in two or three days. Not nothing has been finished in the first week, as the President proclaimed. This is going to be, and I hate to even use the Q word, but Quagmire, this is going to be difficult and it may not be the right approach.

[Ben Parker]

It does feel like we're sort of going through all of the strategic motions of Vietnam, but on a speed run. And as if to confirm that, we have a clip of Trump on Fox News this morning talking about how we're just not bombing enough. Matt, can we play that clip?

[Unidentified Technician]

Please read the Wall Street Journal. It's like they did an editorial today about we're not hitting them hard enough. I mean, it's just not hitting them hard enough. We dropped $250 million worth of bombs on them last night. You know, the whole thing is crazy. But, and they're, and they're really in submission. They just don't know it yet. Okay. To be honest with you, they just don't know it yet.

[Ben Parker]

You know, we talked yesterday about how in a lot of ways, Trump and Putin have the same strategic thinking right now. And, and that sounds absolutely Putin esque to me. Oh, this is gonna be over very soon. You know, no one else, I'm the only one who realizes how close we actually are to victory. It is just mind boggling. And this guy clearly lives in a bubble. He is not getting a realistic view of what's happening.