The great and not overrated Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz describes war as “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”
When it comes to Iran, President Joe Biden seems to regard the action of war as ‘an act of showmanship to placate U.S. domestic critics while doing nothing to alter Iran’s escalatory behavior.’
The Biden administration rightly wants to prevent the war between Israel and Hamas from becoming a broader regional war that includes the U.S. and Iran. Elements of the Iranian regime also want to avoid an expanded conflict. Still, team Biden’s very public fear of provoking Iranian escalation is increasingly absurd. Far from avoiding Iran’s new aggression, the Biden administration’s desperate effort to avoid aggravating Iran risks only encouraging it to believe it has wiggle room to wreak more carnage against American interests without suffering painful U.S. retaliation.
Take the U.S. retaliatory strikes Friday against Iranian-aligned militias in Iraq and Syria. In response to an Iranian-aligned militia’s killing of three American service personnel, the Biden administration sought to make a big play out of the fact that the U.S. struck dozens of militia targets Friday evening and Saturday morning. The narrative was that Biden had hit back hard. Some in the media shared that assessment. Politico called the strikes “a massive show of American firepower.”
I disagree. In reality, these strikes were a massive show of American political pyrotechnics. A show designed to sate domestic political concerns in an election year far more than to impose any substantive consequences on Iran for its continued aggression. And the aggression continues with Iranian proxies launching repeated strikes on U.S. interests with apparent impunity since the U.S. action.
Iran’s continued gall is unsurprising.
After all, the U.S. had essentially warned Iran where, how, and when its retaliation strikes were coming. Even if such a warning wasn’t direct, even the most idiotic Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or militia commander need only have looked at Twitter to see that the strikes were imminent. The White House or its agents leaked to numerous media outlets that U.S. airstrikes would be coming ‘within the next few hours,’ thus allowing anyone who might think they would be a target to take cover.
The nearly weeklong delay between these retaliatory strikes and the original killing of three Americans in Jordan further allowed the IRGC and its militias to relocate equipment and personnel out of the line of fire. Again, you don’t need to be Clausewitz to realize that telling the enemy where, when, and how you’re about to attack him is a pretty good way for him to mitigate his vulnerability to said attack. At the strategic level, Biden’s desperate fear of protecting the enemy even as he attacks him reeks of weakness. It evinces a desire to put the showmanship of bomb-dropping before the practical purpose of that ordnance: to damage an enemy pursuant to altering his strategic calculus.
Apparently unsatisfied with its waltz of weakness, the Biden administration is now doubling down on its ‘please don’t be too upset with us’ message to Iran. On Monday, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder totally undermined days of pledges from national security adviser Jake Sullivan and National Security Council spokesman John Kirby that Friday’s strikes were only the start. Notwithstanding the fact that Ryder should have been relieved of his duties after misleading the public over Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s recent disappearing act, Ryder was pretty clear about the administration’s hesitate-first policy. As he put it, “Our goal is not to OK, game on, let’s just do this and go full-scale war against Iranian proxy groups in Iraq and Syria.”
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No one doubts that the administration does not want a broader war. Very few people want that outcome. But when Ryder openly states the desire to avoid war so directly and soon after American deaths, he only plays to Iran’s perception that it has untapped latitude to kill Americans without serious riposte.
Put another way, the Biden administration’s deterrence strategy for Iran is entirely unserious.