It seems clear at this point that the Trump administration is taking steps to invent a new confrontation with Iran. The drawing up of a new plan for sending 120,000 troops to the region "should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons," as unnamed administration officials told The New York Times, is part of that push.
The revisions were ordered by hard-liners led by John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser. They do not call for a land invasion of Iran, which would require vastly more troops, officials said.
What's less clear is (1) just who is really in charge here and (2) how far they will go to create reasons for using that substantial military force. Iran has not a thing to gain from "attacking" American forces, and the odds of it doing so are therefore near zero; we can surmise that it is the second scenario above, in which Iran resumes nuclear weapons development after the unilateral nullification by the Trump administration of the agreement requiring it to stop, that Bolton and his team are planning for.
The Trump team has had only limited success in convincing allies that now that the United States has withdrawn itself from the nuclear nonproliferation deal, the whole thing now counts as invalid—and it takes some doing for longtime allies of the United States to look long and hard at United States actions, Iranian actions, and come down on the side of the dodgy theocracy. But Team Trump's saber-rattling has had just that effect, with a British deputy commander of the anti-ISIS multilateral task force emphasizing that there "has been no increased threat from Iranian backed forces" in the region, a statement in seeming direct contradiction of the State Department's dire new warnings.
What may be happening is a new wave of attacks by Yemeni military forces in the mostly one-sided and frequently horrific Saudi-led war in that country; Iran does indeed support those forces, as part of the region's usual proxy battles among each of the major local powers.
But is this new push toward large-scale military confrontation with Iran being done at Trump's insistence, or is he himself being goaded into it? We cannot know for sure because the man is, again, a stone-cold idiot who operates on reflex rather than knowledge. Asked directly about the Times' story about plans for 120,000 troops, he again burped out a claim that it was "fake news," following up with the usual round of braggadocio and bluster: “Would I do that? Absolutely. But we have not planned for that. Hopefully we won’t have to plan for that. If we did that we would send a hell of a lot more troops than that.”
The man may sincerely not be aware of what his own subordinates' strategies are; while the Times and other watchers seem to take some comfort in Trump's reflexive anti-interventionism as signal that he would be hostile towards launching yet another new war even as he chafes at United States involvement in the current ones, it seems just as likely that he could be goaded into new military actions with a Bolton-led—or Sean Hannity-led—promise that it would serve as evidence of his "toughness."
In Trump's television-tuned mind, launching an attack against Iranian forces or on Iranian soil using "only" 120,000 troops might count as the sort of dignified restraint his detractors are always demanding of him.