By Adam Cancryn, Zachary Cohen, Alayna Treene, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump is weighing several options for dramatically escalating the war against Iran should his latest push for diplomacy fail.
None of them are ideal.
While the military campaign has heavily focused on bombing the country so far, Pentagon officials preparing for a next phase of war have drawn up scenarios for deploying troops to seize various targets within Iran, according to more than half a dozen people familiar with the discussions.
Yet not only would those scenarios risk heavy casualties, there’s also little guarantee they would successfully end the conflict.
The internal game-planning has taken on growing importance as Trump plots the next stage of his Middle East campaign — and as economic and political pressure builds on him to find a decisive way to end the war.
Yet even as he orders thousands more soldiers to the region, Trump has waffled on whether to further intensify the conflict, wary that a misstep now would turn the war into an increasingly bloody and prolonged endeavor.
“They’re defeated, they can’t make a comeback,” Trump said of Iran during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday. “They now have a chance to make a deal. But that’s up to them.”
Diplomatic efforts continue
Trump has made clear in recent days that he wants a quick end to the war, even if he’s not yet sure how exactly to secure it. After threatening last week to bomb Iran’s power plants, Trump backed down, saying he had gotten indications that Iranian officials were now willing to talk.
On Thursday, he further extended the timeline, declaring that he’d hold off until April 6 on targeting Iranian energy infrastructure in hopes of making progress at the negotiating table.
Still, it’s unclear how fruitful those efforts will be. A 15-point peace proposal drawn up by Trump officials was swiftly rejected by Iran. The regime’s own demands — which included paying war damages and reparations — was also deemed a nonstarter.
And while Trump has continued to insist that the talks are “going very well,” he’s alternately threatened to step up attacks in a bid to force Iran to capitulate if it does not cooperate.
“It’s the job of the Pentagon to make preparations in order to give the Commander in Chief maximal optionality,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “It does not mean the President has made a decision, and as the President said in the Oval Office recently, he is not planning to send ground troops anywhere at this time.”
The US and Israel have already subjected Iran to weeks of intense shelling, killing a swath of senior leaders and taking out much of the nation’s offensive capabilities.
Still, the Iranian regime has only further consolidated its control over the country. It’s also tightened its grip on the Strait of Hormuz, effectively choking off the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf and throwing the global energy markets into a crisis that’s worsening by the day. Administration officials have sought ways to eliminate that key point of economic leverage, either by seizing control of the strait or decimating Iran’s ability to continue its own lucrative