Kharg Island sits in the northwestern Persian Gulf, roughly 25 kilometres off the Iranian coast. Small in area — barely 18 square kilometres — it is disproportionate in strategic consequence. As Middle East Eye reports, Iran exports around 90 percent of its crude oil through the island's terminals, making it the single most important node in Iranian export infrastructure and, by extension, one of the most consequential pieces of real estate in global energy markets. It is equipped with deepwater jetties capable of handling supertankers, a dedicated pipeline network feeding directly from onshore Iranian fields, and significant storage capacity. Its destruction or capture would not merely inconvenience Tehran — it would effectively sever the Islamic Republic's economic lifeline.
The island's modern significance was forged under the Pahlavi dynasty. Under Mohammad Reza Shah, Iran developed Kharg into a world-class export terminal during the 1950s and 1960s, transforming what had been a modest pearl-diving outpost into the arterial heart of one of the world's major oil economies. This infrastructure became a prime target during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. Iraqi aircraft struck the island repeatedly between 1985 and 1988 in what became known as the "tanker war," yet Iran displayed a remarkable capacity to repair, adapt, and continue exporting — a resilience that has defined the island's operational history ever since.
A Four-Decade-Old Idea
What makes the current moment analytically significant is precisely what Middle East Eye surfaces from the historical record. Trump's interest in Kharg Island is not a product of present-day strategic calculation — it is a revival. Middle East Eye cites a 1988 Guardian interview in which Trump stated plainly: "One bullet shot at one of our men or ships, and I'd do a number on Kharg Island. I'd go in and take it." He elaborated that "it'd be good for the world to take them on," framing the seizure in the maximalist language of punishment and psychological dominance rather than in the measured vocabulary of geopolitical strategy.
The Axios Disclosure and Current Discussions
Middle East Eye reports that Axios disclosed discussions between US and Israeli officials specifically concerning the seizure of Kharg Island. The framing matters: these are reported discussions, not confirmed operational plans. Nevertheless, their emergence in the context of an active US-Israeli military campaign against Iran lends them a weight that comparable speculation in peacetime would not carry. Middle East Eye also reports that Bloomberg noted Iranian oil loading at Kharg was still occurring as late as one week into the US-Israeli attack, though its current operational status remained unclear — itself a telling indicator of both Iranian resilience and the limits of the campaign to date.
Critical Assessment of Viability
The idea deserves rigorous scrutiny, because the gap between Trump's instinctive appeal to it and its operational and strategic viability is considerable.
Militarily, seizing Kharg Island would require not merely air and naval supremacy over the Gulf — which US forces could likely establish — but a sustained amphibious or airborne assault followed by an occupation of a defended facility on Iranian sovereign territory. Iran has invested significantly in hardening its military presence across Gulf assets since the 1980s. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy operates a layered asymmetric doctrine specifically designed to complicate US power projection in confined littoral environments. A landing force securing the island against Iranian counterattack, including potential ballistic and drone strikes, would face a challenge that is logistically and politically of a different order entirely from a strike campaign.
Legally and diplomatically, the seizure of a sovereign state's territory absent a formal declaration of war would be without precedent in the post-1945 international order, even accounting for the many violations of that order. It would generate immediate condemnation from virtually every major power — including, almost certainly, several of Washington's own allies — and would complicate US relationships with Gulf Arab states whose cooperation underwrites American regional posture.
Economically, the logic of seizure contains a profound internal contradiction. Middle East Eye notes that roughly 20 percent of the world's oil and natural gas supplies pass through the Strait of Hormuz, which is described as effectively closed. The US-Israeli campaign has already produced what the report characterises as the worst energy crisis since the 1970s Arab oil embargo. Seizing Kharg would not resolve that crisis — Iranian forces could sabotage the terminal before or during any assault, rendering the prize worthless. And an occupation would require defending critical infrastructure against a nation with demonstrated capacity for sustained irregular warfare, for an indefinite period.
Historically, the Iran-Iraq War precedent should give pause. Iraqi forces struck Kharg repeatedly and failed to shut it down. A country with far greater military resources than Saddam Hussein's Iraq ultimately could not neutralise the island through air power alone. Occupation is a different proposition — but not a simpler one.
The Deeper Pattern
What the Middle East Eye report ultimately illuminates is less a coherent military doctrine than a recurring psychological template. Trump's 1988 framing was explicitly about perception — Iran making the US "look like a bunch of fools," the need to be "harsh," to assert dominance. The seizure of Kharg Island, in this reading, is not primarily a strategic instrument but a symbolic one: the ultimate demonstration of American will. The problem is that symbolic ambitions, when translated into kinetic operations against hardened, geopolitically significant targets in a context of active regional conflict, have a history of generating consequences that rapidly outrun the original logic — as the 1980s themselves, and the Iran-Contra affair Middle East Eye references, amply demonstrate.
The idea is not without military preconditions that could theoretically be met. But the distance between a 1988 interview soundbite and a viable combined-arms seizure of a major oil export terminal, defended by a nation at war on its home territory, remains very large indeed.
Photo: Google Earth