Before calling Iran irrational, we should be clear about what we mean.
In strategy, rational does not mean moderate, humane, or wise. It means choosing actions that make sense in light of the objectives you value and the costs you are willing to bear.
By American standards, Iran’s behavior can look almost incomprehensible. Its ships are destroyed. Its military infrastructure is battered. Its economy suffers. Its leaders know they are confronting a country with overwhelming military superiority. Yet Tehran absorbs the punishment and escalates again.
This week offered another example. U.S. Central Command said it destroyed five Iranian crude-oil carriers after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeted a U.S. Navy warship with ballistic missiles twice in two days.
Why would Iran keep doing this?
Because our definition of an intolerable cost may not be theirs.
American leaders naturally weigh casualties, economic damage, oil prices, public support, elections, and how quickly a war can end. The leaders of the Islamic Republic weigh those things too. But they have also shown that they place enormous value on regime survival, resistance to humiliation, revolutionary legitimacy, and proving that outside coercion cannot force them to submit.
Seen through that lens, behavior that looks irrational from Washington may be consistent with Tehran’s priorities.
History should have cured us of assuming otherwise. Iran accepted U.N. Security Council Resolution 598 in July 1988, paving the way for the ceasefire that ended eight years of war only after enormous losses, battlefield reversals, and economic exhaustion. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini likened accepting the ceasefire to drinking a poisoned chalice.
Iran could be compelled. But it tolerated far more pain before yielding than most Western governments would consider politically acceptable.
That matters now.
There is nothing irrational about retaliating when Iran attacks American forces. Failing to respond would invite more aggression. The question is what we believe each retaliation is supposed to accomplish.
If the purpose is immediate defense, punishment, or degrading Iran’s ability to strike again, limited attacks can make sense.
But if Washington believes steadily increasing the punishment will eventually cause the Islamic Republic to conclude that surrender is the rational choice, the strategy rests on a dangerous assumption: that Iran will eventually begin valuing costs the way we do.
Why should it?
A destroyed tanker may tell Washington that the price of aggression just increased. Tehran may draw a different lesson: America is still imposing survivable costs while leaving the regime itself intact.
Here, the question of rationality turns back on us.
It is one thing to miscalculate an enemy’s pain threshold. It is another to discover that you miscalculated it and continue using the same strategy anyway.
We have decades of evidence that the Islamic Republic will accept costs outsiders expect to force changes in behavior. If we understand that, yet keep climbing the escalation ladder because another tanker, missile battery, or round of sanctions is supposed to make Tehran think like Washington, then Iran is no longer the only actor whose rationality deserves scrutiny.
There is one sound reason to continue incremental retaliation for a time: preparation.
The United States may need time to reposition forces, protect bases and allies, replenish defenses, secure shipping, coordinate with Israel, prepare for Iranian retaliation, and plan for what comes next. If limited strikes are buying that time while preventing Iran from attacking with impunity, they serve a purpose.
But buying time is rational only if we intend to use it.
If we are simply waiting for the Islamic Republic to reach a pain threshold that its own history tells us is extraordinarily high, delay is not a strategy. It is procrastination.
That brings us to the question Washington has spent decades trying to avoid.
The strategic problem is not one tanker, missile battery, proxy, nuclear site, or commander. Those are manifestations of a political system that repeatedly rebuilds the capabilities we destroy and recreates the threats we try to contain.
If the goal is a durable end to this cycle, then the strategic objective must ultimately be the end of the Islamic Republic as Iran’s ruling system.
That does not mean destroying Iran, occupying Tehran, or dismantling the Iranian state. A post-Islamic Republic Iran will still need functioning ministries, hospitals, ports, power plants, civil servants, military officers, engineers, and oil workers. Preserving Iran and preserving the regime are not the same thing.
No one can guarantee that what follows will be peaceful, democratic, or friendly to the U.S. That uncertainty is real and demands serious preparation.
But uncertainty about what follows does not make a failing strategy successful.
We began by asking whether Iran is behaving rationally.
Its leaders may be fanatical. Their objectives may be abhorrent. Their willingness to absorb suffering may appall us. But they have repeatedly shown what they value and what they are prepared to endure.
Rational American strategy begins by believing them.
If Washington needs time, take it. If limited retaliation is necessary while we prepare, continue it.
But if America is climbing the escalation ladder because it expects the Islamic Republic eventually to surrender on terms that make sense to us, we are repeating an experiment whose result we already know.
TED LIEU ISN’T LYING — HE’S TELLING YOU HALF THE STORY
Iran has told us how it thinks.
The irrational thing would be refusing to listen.
Arie Blitz, M.D., M.B.A., is a retired physician and independent writer in Weslaco, Texas, who writes on foreign policy, medical ethics, and public policy.