Biden Weighs Options for Retaliating Against Iran

Just hours after Sunday’s lethal drone assault by suspected Iran-backed militants on a U.S. army outpost in Jordan left three U.S. service members useless and greater than 30 wounded, a well-known refrain of hawks started calling—as soon as once more—for the Biden administration to bomb Iran.

First it was Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. “Hit Iran now,” he tweeted. “Hit them arduous.”

Graham’s Senate colleague John Cornyn was much more blunt. “Target Tehran,” he wrote on X, previously Twitter. 

And Sen. Tom Cotton stated that something lower than hitting Iran immediately “will affirm Joe Biden as a coward unworthy of being commander-in-chief.” 

The Biden administration stated in an announcement on Sunday that U.S. intelligence had already decided that the drone strike was orchestrated by “radical Iran-backed militant teams” in Syria and Iraq. The Associated Press reported on Monday that teams in Iraq have been particularly accountable, and a coalition of Iran-backed militias known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed on Sunday that it had focused U.S. personnel within the neighborhood, but it surely didn’t explicitly affirm that it had carried out this particular assault.

Iran stated it had “no connection and had nothing to do” with the strike, stating that choices by so-called “resistance teams” within the area to assault U.S. forces are made by the teams on their very own. However, Iran stays the first backer of such teams, and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps maintains shut ties with them.

For weeks, the Biden administration has tried to make use of a restricted strategy to cease assaults by Iran-backed militants in Iraq and Syria—who’ve focused U.S. service members in these nations 165 occasions since October, in accordance with one U.S. official—in an effort to stop the battle within the Middle East, which has already expanded past the Gaza Strip to incorporate southern Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria, from escalating right into a full-fledged regional warfare. In response, the Biden administration has responded with eight rounds of airstrikes on Iranian proxies in Iraq and Syria since October, and an identical variety of strikes towards the Iran-backed Houthi insurgent group in Yemen. 

Now, underneath immense stress in Washington after the deadliest assault on U.S. service members within the area in 4 years, Biden himself seems to be indicating that the established order of restricted strikes on Iranian-backed militia bases in Iraq and Syria and taking pictures Houthi missiles off of their launchers in Yemen shouldn’t be going to chop it anymore.

“We had a tricky day final night time within the Middle East. We misplaced three courageous souls in an assault on one in all our bases,” Biden stated at an occasion in South Carolina on Sunday. “And we will reply.”

But how would possibly Biden accomplish that? As the U.S. Defense Department attracts up army plans for Biden to contemplate, Foreign Policy talked to a spread of former officers and consultants about what his choices are. They outlined three potential methods ahead: hanging inside Iran, hitting Iranian targets within the area, or pursuing diplomacy. 

Option 1: Strikes Inside Iran

In the wake of Sunday’s drone strike on Tower 22, a distant U.S. desert logistics hub in Jordan positioned close to its borders with each Iraq and Syria that’s used to assist coordinate the struggle towards the Islamic State, Biden’s critics converged on an identical line of assault: In preserving strikes towards Iranian proxies restricted to make sure that army tensions within the Middle East didn’t escalate, the Biden administration really allowed Iran to set the desk for additional escalation. 

And some former U.S. army officers are insistent that complete strikes inside Iran itself are the one option to ship the message to Tehran to knock it off. 

“We’ve allowed ourselves to return to a degree the place now, direct strikes on Iran are what’s required to quell this exercise,” stated John Miller, a retired three-star Navy admiral who beforehand commanded the U.S. Fifth Fleet within the Persian Gulf. “In true Iranian style, they’re going to push and push and push, till they sense that they’ve come to a purple line. They try this themselves. They do it via their proxies. Well, they crossed the purple line. They have to be held to account for that.”

Miller stated the United States ought to lead strikes inside Iran that degrade the financial pursuits of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in addition to its potential to ship weapons abroad. And he stated that the United States ought to put in place sanctions that additional cripple Iran’s potential to export oil. 

“It can’t simply be a one-for-one tit for tat—when you kill our people, we’re going to strike again,” Miller stated. “That doesn’t deter them, particularly when coping with proxies, as a result of the Iranians are keen to struggle to the final proxy.” 

Option 2: Strikes Against Iran’s Assets

Not everybody believes in the necessity to strike inside Iran for the United States to reestablish deterrence. Nathan Sales, a former State Department coordinator for counterterrorism throughout the Trump administration, stated that there’s an extended monitor file of the United States telling Iran to curb its provocations by hanging high-value Iranian belongings within the area. 

Sales pointed to Operation Praying Mantis, the Reagan administration’s April 1988 marketing campaign of strikes on Iranian vessels within the Persian Gulf after a guided missile frigate hit a Tehran-laid mine days earlier. 

And extra just lately, he stated, the January 2020 U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian Quds Force Commander Qassem Suleimani and Popular Mobilization Forces commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis at Baghdad Airport was sufficient to get Iran to largely again down from a tit-for-tat marketing campaign towards U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria.

“In the Eighties, Reagan sank the Iranian Navy, [and] we didn’t hear from Iran a lot after that for some time,” Sales stated. “We smoked Suleimani and Mohandis in 2020, and Iran’s response was to lash out with a few ballistic missile strikes on our troopers in Iraq and Syria. And then it acquired quiet.”

Option 3: Diplomatic Reengagement

The Biden administration began its time period in workplace with a decided diplomatic effort to revive U.S. participation within the Iran nuclear deal after then-President Donald Trump exited the pact in 2018. Even when these talks dried up, till Hamas’s assault into Israel territory final October, the U.S. administration believed that diplomatic efforts to normalize ties between Israel and the Gulf states would put the Middle East on monitor for an untold period of peace and prosperity. And when China brokered a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran in March 2023, some Biden administration officers welcomed it regardless of ongoing U.S.-China competitors, seeing it as a optimistic transfer that would result in regional de-escalation. 

Now, some consultants imagine that the requires U.S. army retaliation towards Tehran danger derailing the Biden administration’s efforts to discover a diplomatic resolution to finish the Israel-Hamas battle and de-escalate tensions with Iran. And they’re urging the Biden administration to take a step again from the purple button and a step towards the bargaining desk. 

“Ultimately, it is advisable to get to some sort of modus vivendi of which Iran is part,” stated Matt Duss, the chief vice chairman on the Center for International Policy, a Washington assume tank, who additionally served as a former foreign-policy advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders. Though, he added, “I’m not going to attempt to fake that is easy.”

Duss stated that along with getting again to the bargaining desk for a brand new Iran deal, the United States must also proceed to push for a reputable two-state resolution to finish the Israel-Palestine battle and put situations on U.S. army help to Israel in mild of its bloody warfare within the Gaza Strip, which has killed greater than 25,000 Palestinians.

“This is a chance for Biden to shift and actually begin to get behind a constant strategy to human rights, to democracy, to accountable authorities and to worldwide humanitarian regulation,” Duss added. 

Ripple Effects

Is there a danger to the Biden administration going too large, or too small? What is excellent? 

No one Foreign Policy talked to thought that the Biden administration was contemplating large-scale strikes on Tehran or one thing that may take out Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But there’s a danger calculus for Tehran right here, too. Sales, the previous State Department counterterrorism chief, stated that Iran is attempting to keep away from open warfare with the United States in any respect prices. “They know that in the event that they interact in open battle with the United States, that’s existential to the regime,” he stated.

Some fear that going too large—hanging within Iran—might put the U.S. right into a scorching warfare with Tehran. “Let’s be sincere—there have been folks on this city who’ve been scorching for a warfare with Iran for, you understand, 20 years,” Duss stated. 

Others insist that the value of inaction is even better. Miller, the previous U.S. Fifth Fleet commander, stated that with out hanging Iranian soil, the United States is more likely to proceed to see Iranian proxies goal worldwide transport within the Red Sea and choke factors such because the Bab el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz, which has pressured many Western corporations to as an alternative take the 4,000-mile detour across the Horn of Africa. And, he stated, they are going to sustain the stress on U.S. troops. 

“What are the results after we don’t do something?” Miller stated. “We’re already studying what these are.”

And whereas others assume that Iran could be deterred with out U.S. strikes on its soil, there may be nonetheless a excessive danger of a U.S. response that’s seen as feckless. “That is an open invitation to Tehran to proceed to assault Americans,” Sales stated. “And we’re going to be seeing extra flag draped caskets coming residence to Dover [Air Force Base].”