Trump seeks ‘decisive’ options for Iran as assets move into Middle East

The discussions are happening while the U.S. sends an aircraft carrier and jet fighters to the Middle East. Those deployments may be the start of a broader buildup that would give Trump the firepower to strike Iran should he choose to use them.

Trump has repeatedly used the word “decisive" when describing what effect he would like any U.S. action to have on Iran, according to officials.

That phrasing has spurred aides at the Pentagon and White House to refine a suite of options for the president, including some that would seek to push the regime out of power. Officials also are devising more modest options, which could include targeting Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities.

Trump has yet to order strikes on Iran and what he ultimately will decide remains unclear, officials say. But the continued discussions show Trump hasn’t ruled out punishing Tehran for killing protesters in the midst of Iran’s spiraling economy.

Death-toll estimates vary, but U.S. officials say the number is likely far higher than the low-end totals of 2,000-3,000 deaths. Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, on Saturday cited the global institution’s assessment that Iranian authorities have killed up to 18,000 people.

Asked Tuesday about whether the U.S. may yet strike Iran, Trump noted that the regime heeded Washington’s warnings and canceled plans to hang 837 people last week. “We’re just going to have to see what happens with Iran," he said.

The larger question for the administration, former officials and experts say, is whether a foreign regime can be dislodged through U.S. air power alone. The White House must also grapple with whether the administration is prepared to carry out a sustained military campaign that might last weeks or months should protesters in Iran again take to the streets and appeal to Trump for protection.

“There are things military options can and can’t do during a human-rights crackdown. You can deter some regime behavior on the margins," said David Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who played a key role in the 1991 Desert Storm air campaign against Iraq. “If you are really signing up to change the regime, that’s going to require significant air and ground operations."

As the administration discusses next steps, the U.S. military has rushed more assets to the Middle East.

U.S. F-15E jet fighters landed Sunday in Jordan, according to U.S. officials and flight tracking data. The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and its strike group, which includes destroyers, F-35s and other jet fighters and electronic-jamming aircraft, were spotted by maritime-traffic trackers sailing west from the South China Sea toward the Persian Gulf.

Additional air defenses will be brought to the region, U.S. officials said, including more Patriot and Thaad antimissile systems, which would be essential for fending off any Iranian counter blows.

The arrival of more military hardware in the Middle East will present the U.S. with more strike options, officials said. National security adviser and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday spoke about Iran with Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, whose support would be required in an air campaign against Iran.

As the Iranian protests unfolded last week, Trump received multiple briefings on the complexities of a military campaign, including how U.S. airstrikes wouldn’t guarantee the government’s collapse.

Some officials have since raised questions internally about the political objective of strikes on Iran at this point. Trump is aware that any military action would come well after he promised protesters “help is on its way" and is unlikely to be as swift as the operation that ousted former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

The White House has yet to publicly articulate its plan for how Iran might be governed should the U.S. succeed in toppling the regime.

“A decapitation strategy may create the pretense of a window of opportunity, but there’s no opposing force on the ground or over the horizon to overtake the regime let alone stabilize the country," said Ramzy Mardini, a geopolitical risk analyst in the Middle East who is a researcher at Stanford University. “Who polices the streets? Who secures the weapons and military installations and nuclear sites? Who patrols the border with Iraq and Afghanistan? The protesters?"

Some aides have raised using nonmilitary means of reprimanding Iran, such as helping protesters coordinate action online or announcing new sanctions on the regime.

U.S. financial pressure “has worked because in December, their economy collapsed," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. “This is why the people took to the street. This is economic statecraft, no shots fired, and things are moving in a very positive way here."

In his inaugural address one year ago, Trump promised that his administration would measure its success partly by “the wars we never get into." In December, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told an audience at the Reagan National Defense Forum that the U.S. was done being “distracted by democracy building, interventionism, undefined wars, regime change."

But the president has sent conflicting signals on the subject of changing Iran’s leadership.

In a Reuters interview last week, Trump expressed skepticism that Iranians would rally around a post-regime figure such as Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s shah overthrown in the 1979 revolution. Yet in a later interview, he said that he wanted Iran’s rulers gone.

“It’s time to look for new leadership in Iran," he told Politico on Saturday, responding to social-media posts from Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei blaming Trump for the protests. “The man is a sick man who should run his country properly and stop killing people," Trump said.

Tehran has promised to target Americans if the U.S. bombs Iran, especially if it takes aim at Iran’s leadership. “​​Any aggression against the Supreme Leader of our country is tantamount to all-out war against the Iranian nation," Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Sunday.

F-15Es have long rotated through Jordan and sending additional jets would buttress U.S. air capabilities in several ways. The two-seater plane, which is operated by a pilot and weapon system officer, can attack ground targets and other aircraft.

F-15Es played an important role in defending Israel from a large-scale Iranian drone attack in 2024. The F-15Es fired air-to-air missiles to intercept the drones and at one point several aircrews even sought unsuccessfully to bomb drones in flight. Since then, the U.S. has equipped F-15Es, which aren’t stealthy, with air-to-air rockets that are specially designed to knock out drones.

A major air campaign inside Iran, however, would likely involve stealthy aircraft such as F-35 fighters and B-2 bombers, as well as cruise missile-firing submarines—weapon systems that featured in the U.S. June strike against Iran’s nuclear sites. So far, no U.S. Air Force F-35s have been observed heading to the Middle East.

As the administration weighed a potential strike on Iran last week, the U.S. didn’t have enough military assets or air defenses in the Middle East to launch a sustained bombing operation or defend American troops and allies from an Iranian retaliation, U.S. and allied officials told Trump.

Israel specifically expressed concerns to Washington about its own defenses should Iran target the country after it burned through its stockpile of interceptors during last year’s 12-day war with Iran, officials said.

After that conflict, the U.S. moved a carrier strike group and some air defenses out of the broader region as Trump set his sights on Venezuela and the Western Hemisphere. But during the fight last June, Trump wrote in a social-media post that the U.S. had intelligence where Iran’s Khamenei was hiding, but “was not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now."

Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com, Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Shelby Holliday at shelby.holliday@wsj.com