The Taking

On Sunday, Trump told the Financial Times: “To be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran but some stupid people back in the U.S. say: ‘why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people.”

He was asked about Kharg Island — the offshore terminal through which more than ninety percent of Iran’s crude oil exports flow. “Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don’t. We have a lot of options.” Then: “I don’t think they have any defense. We could take it very easily.” Then: “It would also mean we had to be there for a while.”

This is the president of the United States, on the record, naming resource seizure as his preferred outcome of a war launched under the justification of freedom of navigation and Iranian nuclear threat. The distance between those two framings — the operational justification and the stated preference — is what this piece is about.

The preference is not new. In 1988, promoting The Art of the Deal in Britain, Trump told a reporter: “One bullet shot at one of our men or ships, and I’d do a number on Kharg Island.” He was a real estate developer. He had no intelligence briefings, no military advisors, no strategic framework. He had a preference.

In 2011, on Twitter: “Iran will soon take all of the oil in Iraq… Keep the oil.” In 2016, at NBC’s Commander-in-Chief Forum: “I’ve always said — shouldn’t be there, but if we’re going to get out, take the oil.” In January 2017, his first day in office, standing inside CIA headquarters: take the oil. In February 2017, to airline executives: “We’ve spent $6 trillion in the Middle East. We’ve got nothing. We never even kept a small, even a tiny oil well. Not one little oil well.”

Thirty-eight years. The preference has been stated continuously since 1988 — through four presidencies including his own first term, through two Gulf Wars, through the JCPOA and its collapse, through sanctions and maximum pressure and the current war. The justifications change. The operational frameworks evolve. The preference is constant.

What the FT interview reveals is not a hidden agenda suddenly exposed. It is the opposite: a publicly stated preference that the policy architecture has been built around without naming. “Freedom of navigation” is the legal and diplomatic framework. “Iranian nuclear threat” is the security framework. “Take the oil” is the preference that predates both frameworks, has survived every policy iteration, and was stated on the record with the same casual directness in 2026 as it was in 1988.

Kharg Island is roughly one-third the size of Manhattan. It sits twenty-one miles off Iran’s southern coast. Through it flows approximately ninety to ninety-four percent of Iran’s crude oil exports — around 950 million barrels per year at pre-war rates. Seizing it would remove Iran’s primary revenue source and hand control of that revenue to whoever holds the island.

The military positioning is underway. The USS Tripoli arrived in the CENTCOM area of operations on March 27 with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit — approximately 3,500 Marines equipped with F-35Bs and amphibious landing craft. The 82nd Airborne’s Immediate Response Force deployed earlier. Total US forces in the region now exceed 50,000, the largest deployment since the Iraq War. The Washington Post reported on March 28 that the Pentagon is preparing for “weeks of limited ground operations” in Iran, including raids on Kharg Island and coastal Hormuz sites. Trump has not yet approved the plans. Karoline Leavitt described the preparations as providing “maximum optionality.”

Trump compared the potential Kharg seizure to the Venezuela operation — seizing control of Venezuela’s oil industry after Maduro’s fall earlier this year. The comparison was his, not an opponent’s characterization.

Under international law, what Trump described has a name. The Hague Regulations of 1907, Article 47: “Pillage is formally forbidden.” Article 55: an occupying state “shall be regarded only as administrator and usufructuary” of the hostile state’s property — it must “safeguard the capital of these properties.” For non-renewable resources like oil, this means an occupant may continue exploitation only at pre-occupation rates, for the benefit of the local population or military necessity, not for extraction to the occupying power. The Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 33: “Pillage is prohibited.” The Rome Statute classifies pillage as a war crime.

The precedent is specific. At Nuremberg, Walther Funk — the Reich Minister for Economic Affairs — was convicted for pillaging Eastern European oil resources. The legal principle was established eighty years ago: a state that seizes another state’s oil during armed conflict commits a war crime. Even during the Iraq occupation, the Bush administration established the Development Fund for Iraq to hold oil revenues “for the benefit of the Iraqi people” — an explicit acknowledgment that American seizure of Iraqi oil would violate international obligations the United States helped create.

“My favorite thing is to take the oil” is not a policy statement that can be walked back by operational planning documents or diplomatic framing. It is a stated preference that, if acted upon, meets the definition of pillage under four separate bodies of international law. The preference was stated casually. The legal architecture surrounding it is not casual at all.

Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf responded before the FT interview was published. On March 26, he wrote: “Certain data demonstrate that the ‘enemies’ are preparing for an operation to occupy an Iranian island with the support of a regional state.” And: “If they take any step forward, all of the vital infrastructure of that regional country will come under unrelenting attacks without any restriction.”

The unnamed regional country is widely interpreted as the UAE or Saudi Arabia — whichever would provide basing for a Kharg operation. Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister was in Islamabad the same week, participating in the four-nation ceasefire mediation. The country being asked to facilitate peace and the country being considered for offensive basing may be the same country.

The war is thirty-one days old. It began with airstrikes. It was justified as self-defense and freedom of navigation. It may yet produce a negotiated outcome — the Islamabad mechanism, the Araghchi-Witkoff channel, the various intermediary tracks are real and active. But the president of the United States has now said, on the record, that his favorite thing about this war is the possibility of taking another country’s oil. Not securing shipping lanes. Not preventing nuclear proliferation. Not protecting allies. Taking oil.

The justification and the preference have coexisted for thirty-eight years. The FT interview did not create the gap between them. It removed the pretense that the gap does not exist.

Sources