One of President Donald Trump’s most potent moves for crippling the Iranian regime may involve seizing a tiny island where gazelles run free near oil infrastructure.
The 5-mile strip of land known as Kharg Island is home to Iran’s most important oil facility, an export terminal in the Persian Gulf that handles up to 90 percent of the nation’s crude. It’s a cornerstone of Iran’s economy and a major source of revenue for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a pillar of the regime that experts say could put down the kind of public uprising that Trump has called for.
If Trump intends to intensify pressure on Iran outside of missile strikes and bombings, seizing Kharg Island would deprive the regime of a key funding source for controlling the population, said Michael Rubin, a senior Pentagon adviser on Iran and Iraq in the George W. Bush administration. He said he has been communicating with White House officials about the strategic importance of the island.
“If they can’t sell their own oil, they can’t make payroll,” said Rubin, who is now a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
“No matter how much we bomb, there’s not going to be regime change until we fracture the Revolutionary Guard, and if this can be a fairly nonviolent way of doing it, all the better,” he added.
Oil is the lifeblood of the Revolutionary Guard. About half of the nation’s $50 billion oil industry is controlled by the force, Reuters has reported. That includes a ghost fleet of oil tankers that take its sanctioned crude abroad, mostly to China.
Rubin, who has been in contact with administration officials about seizing Kharg, said his recommendations have been circulated within the National Security Council. He believes Trump is relying on a small circle of advisers, and it’s not clear if they’re aware of the island’s strategic importance, Rubin said.
“If they themselves aren’t familiar with Kharg, then it doesn’t matter what the State Department desk or the CIA knows about Iran,” he said. “It’s not going to percolate up.”
Neither the White House nor the National Security Council responded to requests for comment.
In the weeks before the U.S. and Israel launched their attacks, Iran ramped up oil production at Kharg.
The facility’s output was pushed to almost record levels, at about 4 million barrels per day, according to Kpler, an energy industry data firm. That marked an explosive increase from its baseline of about 1.5 million barrels a day. Iran hasn’t exported that much oil since 2018, when Trump reimposed nuclear sanctions on the country, the firm found.
American and Israeli forces have tried to avoid striking Iran’s oil infrastructure,according to a former Trump energy adviser who was granted anonymity to talk about current discussions.
“If the goal is to transition quickly to a new government, we would not want to destroy that infrastructure,” said the former official, who argued that seizing Kharg so early in the campaign carries risks to American forces.
“They are inflicting problems on themselves anyway,” the adviser said, referring to Iran. “Once their missile and drone threats have been neutralized, then perhaps.”
Kharg Island has long been viewed by Iran’s opponents as a vulnerability for the regime.
During the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, then-President Jimmy Carter was advised that seizing Kharg could provide leverage against the regime. He chose not to act. His successor, President Ronald Reagan, destroyed other offshore export facilities in the 1980s when Iran mined the Straits of Hormuz. He left Kharg untouched. Then, the oil terminal was partially destroyed by Iraqi forces during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, but it was quickly rebuilt.
It’s unlikely that American or Israeli forces would intentionally damage Kharg, said Ellen Wald, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center. She argued that it could trigger a wave of Iranian retaliation against energy infrastructure across the region, driving up oil prices worldwide.
“As long as Iran has the ability to get oil out, it’s not going to try to take that ability away from anyone else, because it knows that once it does that, its oil infrastructure will get destroyed,” Wald said. “It’s sort of this mutually assured destruction, so nobody will do anything.”
Sophia Cai contributed reporting.
