The United States has assembled one of its largest recent military buildups in the Middle East, positioning assets for what a former senior Pentagon official describes as a "sustained, highly kinetic campaign" against Iran should the order come.

The assessment, delivered Sunday by Dana Stroul, now research director at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, lands days before Washington and Tehran sit down for a second round of indirect nuclear talks in Oman on Feb. 26.

Two carrier strike groups are converging on the region. The USS Gerald R. Ford is transiting the Strait of Gibraltar eastward. The USS Abraham Lincoln is operating in the Arabian Sea. Both will occupy the Middle East CENTCOM theater, with Stroul indicating one will be stationed in the eastern Mediterranean and the other in the Arabian Gulf, Fox News reported.

Stroul told Fox News Digital the buildup dwarfs previous postures and drew a sharp distinction from the June 2025 strikes on Iranian-linked nuclear targets, which she characterized as limited but highly targeted operations designed to degrade key facilities without triggering a regional war. This is something different.

"The U.S. military is ready for a sustained, highly kinetic campaign should President Trump order it, and also prepared to defend allies and partners in the Middle East from Iran's missiles."

A buildup with no peer

The Ford's redeployment tells its own story. The carrier was heading home and received orders to turn around. That kind of redirection doesn't happen for diplomatic theater. Stroul noted the Pentagon has increased the number of guided-missile destroyers, fighter aircraft, refuelers, and air defense systems in the region, building on a posture that already included two carriers during last summer's 12-day war and Operation Midnight Hammer.

"The U.S. military can rapidly reposition assets from all over the world and deploy overwhelmingly lethal force in a short period of time to one theater."

Stroul was blunt about the gap between American capability and anything else on the planet, saying there is "no ally or enemy capable of what we have seen from the U.S. in this current buildup." The specific destinations of the carriers have not been publicly disclosed for operational security reasons, but the trajectory is unmistakable.

Iran's weak hand

Tehran finds itself in a position it spent decades trying to avoid: militarily outmatched, strategically isolated, and negotiating from desperation rather than strength. Stroul's assessment of Iran's posture was withering.

"Iran's leaders are playing a weak hand by combining saber-rattling about their own capabilities, staging preparations and exercises to signal readiness."

The regime's conventional inferiority is not a matter of debate. Israel dominated Iranian airspace in a single day last year, targeted many of Iran's security leaders, and took out half of its missile arsenal. The U.S. significantly set back Iran's nuclear program. The proxy network that Tehran spent decades cultivating across the region has been degraded after more than two years of Israeli operations, and those proxies declined to enter the war and support Iran's defense last summer.

That last point deserves attention. Iran built its entire regional strategy around proxy forces that would activate in a crisis. When the crisis came, they sat it out. Stroul put it plainly:

"No matter what Iran's leaders say, Iran is not able to rebuild a decades-long project in a few months."

So Iran negotiates. Not because the regime has found religion on nonproliferation, but because the alternative is a military confrontation it cannot win. The indirect talks in Oman, with Oman once again serving as mediator, are Tehran's attempt to slow down a clock that is running against it.

Diplomacy backed by destroyers

There is a school of thought, popular in certain Washington circles, that military buildups undermine diplomatic progress. That framing gets the relationship exactly backward. Iran is at the table because of what is parked in the Arabian Sea, not in spite of it. Carrier strike groups do not obstruct negotiations. They set the terms.

The June 2025 strikes demonstrated that the United States would act on Iranian nuclear infrastructure when circumstances demanded it. The current buildup signals that those strikes were a floor, not a ceiling. Stroul emphasized that the Ford's addition "expands U.S. offensive capabilities if we go to war with Iran," a sentence that reads less like analysis and more like a message directed at Tehran's decision-makers.

Stroul framed the situation with a clarity that official Washington often avoids:

"They are attempting to slow this down by pursuing negotiations. No one should be under any illusions about the reality of US dominance — Iran is completely outmatched in conventional terms."

A political decision, not a military one

The most important line in Stroul's assessment may be the simplest. After cataloging the scale of the buildup, the degradation of Iran's proxies, the destruction of its missile arsenal, and the vulnerability of its nuclear program, she reduced the entire question to its essential terms: "It is not a question of military readiness, but a political decision."

The military is positioned. The assets are in theater. The capability gap between the United States and Iran is not narrowing. What happens next depends on whether Tehran offers something real at the table on Feb. 26, or whether it continues the same stalling game that brought it to this point.

President Trump has the cards. Iran knows it. The guided-missile destroyers in the Arabian Gulf know it. The only question is what Tehran is willing to concede before the decision gets made for them.