I.  The Strategic Profile of the Five Islands: What Is Actually at Stake

Before any historical or geopolitical analysis can proceed with precision, the five islands must be understood as distinct strategic entities rather than a homogeneous archipelago. Each has its own geographic position, military function, civilian character, and seizure calculus and the policy debate that conflates them, treating them as interchangeable pressure points on a common strategic dial, systematically distorts the choices available.

Table 1: Strategic Profile of Iranian Islands Under Discussion

The table’s most analytically significant feature is the divergence between Kharg and Larak in their relationship to the war’s central operational problem: the Hormuz closure. Kharg, located 483 kilometers northwest of the strait at the head of the Persian Gulf, is Iran’s economic jugular. The terminal through which ninety percent of its crude oil exports pass, but its seizure would not directly reopen Hormuz. Larak, sitting at the strait’s narrowest point, is the maritime control node from which Iran is regulating passage: Iran has established its own shipping channel north of Larak Island, charging vessels two million dollars for transit authorization and selectively permitting ships from China, Pakistan, Malaysia, and India while blocking American and Israeli-affiliated vessels. Seizing Larak addresses the Hormuz problem directly; seizing Kharg addresses the Iranian economy. These are related but distinct strategic objectives, and the choice between them reflects deeper questions about whether the war’s goal is to coerce Iran into opening the strait or to degrade Iran’s capacity to sustain any form of state functioning.

Qeshm deserves separate analytical treatment because of its scale and its civilian character. At 1,491 square kilometers, larger than the combined area of the other four islands many times over  and with 150,000 permanent residents, Qeshm is not a military installation that can be seized by a Marine Expeditionary Unit but a populated territory whose occupation would constitute something close to a conventional ground invasion with all the legal, humanitarian, and operational consequences that entails. The allegation that the United States struck a desalination plant on Qeshm on March 8 disrupting water supplies to thirty villages, a charge Washington denies illustrates the degree to which the island’s civilian infrastructure is already caught in the conflict’s blast radius, and the reputational and legal costs of more direct engagement would be severe.

II. The Deep Historical Record

The idea of seizing Iranian islands to control Persian Gulf commerce is not a novelty of the Trump administration. It is one of the oldest strategic templates in the history of maritime power projection, with a record stretching back five centuries that contains lessons whose contemporary relevance is imperfectly appreciated in current policy debates.

Table 2: Historical Precedents for Island Seizures in the Persian Gulf (1507 to 1988)

The Portuguese experience of 1507 to 1622 is the foundational case in this history, and its lessons are more nuanced than the simple narrative of imperial overreach that it is sometimes reduced to. Albuquerque’s seizure of Hormuz Island was, at the moment of its execution, a stroke of strategic genius: by controlling the island at the mouth of the Gulf, Portugal effectively taxed all commerce between the Indian Ocean and the Gulf’s Arab, Persian, and Ottoman hinterlands without needing to project military force into the continental interior. The model worked for over a century because the island was geographically self-contained, its garrison could be supplied by sea without dependence on the mainland, and the commercial traffic it sought to tax had no viable alternative route. It failed in 1622 not because of military defeat but because Shah Abbas I offered the English East India Company a commercial arrangement  a share of the trading revenues at the new port of Bandar Abbas that made the Portuguese monopoly economically unnecessary. The lesson is precise: island control generates leverage only as long as the party being coerced has no viable alternative and the occupying power can sustain its maritime supply lines indefinitely.

The 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, and the seizure of Kharg as a logistics node for the Allied supply corridor to the Soviet Union, provides the most direct modern precedent for the current debate. British and Soviet forces occupied Kharg and Iran’s southern ports to establish what became known as the Persian Corridor. The route through which approximately four million tonnes of supplies reached the Soviet war effort. The operation was militarily straightforward because Iran’s Reza Shah Pahlavi had neither the military capacity to resist two great powers simultaneously nor the political will to sacrifice his country for Germany. The contemporary parallel breaks down precisely here: Iran in 2026 is not a compliant neutral power; it is a state that has already absorbed the killing of its supreme leader and continued fighting for twenty-nine days, whose IRGC retains the capacity for sustained missile and drone attacks on forces within range, and whose new supreme leader has explicitly declared the strait closure a tool of leverage that will not be surrendered without negotiation.

The Iraq-Iran Tanker War precedent of the 1980s is the most analytically important historical case for the current debate, and it is the one that receives the least attention in contemporary policy commentary. Iraq launched sustained aerial strikes against Kharg Island beginning in 1983, attacking the terminal repeatedly over three years in an attempt to shut down Iran’s oil exports and deprive the Khomeini government of the revenues sustaining its war effort. The results were instructive: Iran adapted. It developed a shuttle tanker system that transferred crude to floating storage and relay points further down the Gulf, built alternative loading facilities at Sirri Island and Larak, and maintained export revenues reduced but not eliminated throughout the attack campaign. By 1986, despite dozens of Iraqi strikes on Kharg infrastructure, Iran was still exporting oil. The military conclusion drawn by analysts at the time, and reinforced by the current debate, is that Kharg’s geographic isolation and its centrality to Iranian economic functioning make it a target of enormous pressure value — but not a kill switch whose seizure instantly ends the conflict.

III. The 1971 Islands Dispute: Unresolved History Returns

The geopolitical context of any discussion of seizing Iranian islands cannot be complete without addressing the oldest island dispute in the current theater: the 1971 seizure by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunb islands from the newly independent UAE. UAE’s continuing claim to all three islands has been a persistent irritant in Iranian-Arab relations across five decades.

The strategic significance of Abu Musa and the Tunbs in the current conflict is threefold. First, the islands are positioned near the western entrance to the Strait of Hormuz and are currently armed with Iranian missiles, drones, and mine-laying vessels making them direct components of Iran’s Hormuz closure strategy. Second, the Pentagon has explicitly discussed seizing Abu Musa as a potential strategic foothold near the strait, a move that would simultaneously serve the military objective of degrading Iranian strait-control capacity and the political objective of addressing the UAE’s long-standing territorial grievance. Third, and most delicately, any American operation to seize Abu Musa would place the United States in the position of de facto enforcer of a UAE territorial claim that has never been recognized by the international community. A legal and diplomatic complication whose long-term consequences would survive the immediate military context by decades.

The historical irony of this situation is not lost on informed observers: the Shah’s 1971 recontrol of the Tunbs was itself conducted with British facilitation, occurring on the day that Britain formally withdrew from its Persian Gulf treaty obligations and in circumstances where London’s decision to end the Trucial States’ protected status created the power vacuum that Iranian forces filled. A 2026 American operation to reverse this seizure or to use it as a military pretext while leaving the territorial question unresolved would be the latest in a long series of great-power interventions in Gulf island politics whose consequences have consistently outlasted the immediate strategic calculations that motivated them.

IV. The Contemporary Geopolitical Calculus

Day 29 of Operation Epic Fury finds the strategic situation at a pivotal juncture. Trump has given Iran a ten-day extension to open the strait until April 6, 2026, pausing strikes on energy infrastructure while diplomatic back-channels through Qatar and Oman explore the terms of a negotiated settlement. Simultaneously, two US Navy Amphibious Ready Groups with their embarked Marine Expeditionary Units and elements of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division are moving toward the Middle East, and the Pentagon has confirmed it is developing military options for a “knockout blow.” The combination of the diplomatic pause and the military buildup reflects the classic coercive leverage logic: demonstrate credible military capability to seize Kharg while negotiating, in the hope that Iran’s leadership calculates that making a deal is preferable to occupation.

The strategic logic is coherent. The execution risks are severe. Former US Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, has estimated that the current deployment involves approximately four to five thousand “trigger pullers” enough to seize a small target for a limited period, but explicitly insufficient for sustained occupation without substantial reinforcement. The Atlantic Council analysis published March 26 argues that a Kharg seizure is “more likely to expand and extend the war than it is to deliver any sort of decisive victory,” for reasons rooted in geography and logistics rather than Iranian military capability.

Kharg’s position at the western end of the Persian Gulf, 483 kilometers northwest of the Strait of Hormuz means that any force seizing and holding the island must be supplied by sea through the entirety of the Gulf’s length, passing within range of Iranian coastal missiles, drone swarms from the mainland 33 kilometers away, and rocket artillery that does not require sophisticated guidance to saturate a fixed island target. The US Navy destroyers providing air defense for island-based forces would be simultaneously unavailable for the tanker convoy escort mission that the Hormuz reopening requires. The sustainment tail of an extended Kharg occupation would consume naval assets faster than the operation would generate strategic results. A classic overextension trap that Clausewitz would recognize as the friction of occupation transforming a tactical victory into a strategic liability.

Against Kharg’s complications, Larak presents a different risk profile that GripRoom’s analysis has identified with particular clarity: “Kharg is the island to watch if the priority becomes punishing Iran economically or bargaining over its oil-export future. Larak is the island to watch if the priority is who can actually regulate, disrupt, or restore movement through Hormuz itself.” If the immediate objective is reopening the strait  which Trump’s April 6 deadline and the economic pressure of Brent crude above $100 per barrel suggests it is, then Larak is the operationally relevant target. But Larak is heavily fortified with bunkers and fast attack craft, sits at the strait’s choke point where Iranian defensive fire converges, and is close enough to Hormuz Island (where Bandar Abbas, Iran’s main naval base, lies eight kilometers away) that any amphibious landing would face simultaneous threats from multiple directions. Special operations forces could potentially raid Larak to degrade its military installations without attempting occupation the Operation Praying Mantis model of 1988. However, a raid is not an occupation, and its effects on Iranian strait control would be temporary rather than structural.

The most analytically significant development of the past week is Iran’s establishment of its own selective shipping corridor north of Larak Island, effectively transforming the strait closure from a binary open/closed situation into a managed, fee-based access regime. Ships from China, Pakistan, Malaysia, and India have been permitted passage; vessels from American-affiliated operators have not. One ship paid two million dollars for Iranian transit authorization. This selective corridor model achieves several Iranian strategic objectives simultaneously: it maintains economic pressure on the United States and Israel by denying their commercial partners frictionless access; it generates revenue for an economy under severe strain; it creates a differentiation between adversaries and neutrals that complicates any unified international pressure for full reopening; and it demonstrates Iranian sovereignty over the strait’s operational management in a manner that makes the legal and political costs of forcible removal extremely high. An American military operation to seize Larak would not merely be engaging a military installation — it would be dismantling an operational maritime governance system that several major powers, including China, are currently using and paying for.

V. Three Scenarios

With Trump’s April 6 deadline approaching and the Marines moving into position, three scenarios structure the decision space. The first is a negotiated settlement that renders the island question moot: Iran agrees to reopen the strait under terms that preserve enough face for the new Supreme Leadership to manage domestically, the US frames the outcome as coercive success without occupation, and the island forces become a bargaining chip traded away for diplomatic resolution. The economic pressure logic favors this scenario: Iran’s oil revenues are zero as long as the strait is closed; China’s pressure on Tehran to settle is intensifying as its crude supply shortfall grows, and Trump has demonstrated willingness to extend deadlines when diplomatic momentum exists. The backchannel contacts through Qatar reported in the final week of March suggest this scenario has genuine momentum.

The second scenario is a limited strike on Kharg infrastructure, not occupation but destruction designed to accelerate Iranian economic collapse and force a settlement on American terms. This is effectively the Iraq 1983-86 playbook updated for 2026. Its advantage over occupation is that it avoids the sustainment nightmare, the force protection exposure, and the legal complications of holding Iranian territory. Its disadvantage, as the Tanker War record shows, is that Iran has demonstrated the capacity to adapt its oil export infrastructure under sustained aerial attack developing alternative terminals, shuttle systems, and routing arrangements that degrade but do not eliminate export capacity. Former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s argument in The Free Press that a Kharg strike creates leverage for “bringing down the rump regime over the months ahead rather than trading it away” reflects an explicitly maximalist war aim that goes beyond reopening Hormuz and into the territory of regime collapse, with a timeline measured in months rather than weeks.

The third scenario, which the Atlantic Council and FDD analyses both identify as the most likely operational outcome if ground forces are deployed, is a limited seizure of Larak Island by special operations forces, not the full Marine-and-Airborne operation against Kharg that dominates media coverage, but a targeted commando raid on Larak’s military installations designed to degrade Iran’s strait-control infrastructure, disrupt the selective shipping corridor, and demonstrate American resolve without committing to open-ended occupation. This scenario has the operational advantage of addressing the Hormuz problem directly while limiting the force protection exposure. Its strategic limitation is that Iran can rebuild Larak’s installations over time, that the political signal it sends. American forces briefly occupying and then withdrawing from Iranian territory may strengthen Iranian domestic nationalist sentiment rather than induce capitulation, and that any Iranian response striking the withdrawing amphibious forces would create a casualty event that constrains rather than expands American strategic options.

Conclusion

The history of Persian Gulf island politics from Albuquerque’s 1507 seizure of Hormuz to Iraq’s 1980s campaign against Kharg offers a consistent lesson that the current debate is at risk of ignoring: islands generate leverage, but they do not determine political outcomes. Portugal held Hormuz for 115 years and lost it not to military defeat but to a better commercial offer. Britain seized Kharg in 1941 and achieved its strategic objective the supply corridor to the Soviet Union but only because the party it was coercing had no means of resistance. Iraq bombed Kharg repeatedly for three years and failed to collapse Iran’s oil export capacity because Iran adapted. The United States destroyed Iranian oil platforms and naval vessels in 1988 and achieved short-term tactical effect without resolving the underlying political contest.

The current debate’s most important analytical failure is its treatment of island seizure as a substitute for political resolution rather than an instrument of coercive leverage designed to accelerate it. Kharg Island seized by US Marines does not end the war; it begins a new and more dangerous phase in which American forces are pinned on a coral outcrop thirty kilometers from the Iranian mainland, hostage to the same maritime supply vulnerabilities that Portugal discovered five centuries ago, while the Islamic Republic’s new leadership faces the domestic political obligation to fire every available weapon at them. The coercive logic only holds if Iran believes that the United States is willing to absorb those casualties indefinitely  and Trump’s own statements about his eagerness for a deal suggest that his patience is not, in fact, unlimited.

The more strategically coherent option and the one that the historical record from 1988 most directly supports is the Praying Mantis model: targeted destruction of Iran’s military infrastructure on and near the islands, particularly Larak’s control systems and Qeshm’s underground missile storage, without the occupation that converts tactical success into strategic liability. This approach addresses the Hormuz problem operationally while maintaining the pressure dynamic that the April 6 diplomatic deadline is designed to exploit. Whether the Trump administration, whose strategic communication has consistently conflated the maximal objective of regime change with the immediate objective of strait reopening, has the doctrinal discipline to pursue the more modest and more achievable option is the question on which the next phase of the conflict may turn. The answer remains genuinely uncertain and the islands of the Persian Gulf, as they have for five hundred years, wait to see which great power’s reach will exceed its grasp.

Roxana Niknami is Assistant Professor at University of Tehran, European Studies Researcher

GSPI does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of GSPI, its staff, or its trustees.