How the US can thread the deterrence-escalation needle on Iran

President Joe Biden is considering how to respond to an Iranian-orchestrated attack last Sunday on a U.S. military outpost in northeastern Jordan. That attack killed three Americans and wounded dozens more, some very seriously. It showed that previous U.S. efforts to deter Iran from using its Iraqi and Syrian proxy militias to carry out attacks have been unsuccessful.

Iran disingenuously assures us it had nothing to do with Sunday’s attack. The reality is that the militia responsible has deep, subordinated ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. This drone attack showed an unusually significant degree of sophistication, further evincing Iranian malfeasance. The United States must ensure that any retaliation alters Iran’s strategic calculus rather than simply the calculus of one or more of the militias it employs.

Up until now, the U.S. has responded to Iranian-aligned militia attacks with limited air strikes. The White House understandably wants to prevent an escalation of the Israel-Hamas war into a regional war. The White House is partly shaping its policy based on what I understand to be significant tensions within both the Iranian government and the Guard over how aggressively Iran should act toward the U.S. While prior failures saw it lose agents inside Iran, the CIA now has a robust agent network providing insight into Iranian government calculations. The Biden administration thus wants to thread the needle between encouraging more hard-liner Iranian elements to believe that the U.S. is timid or conversely taking excessively aggressive action that bolsters those elements in pushing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei toward greater confrontation. The hard-liner faction is dominated by Quds Force Cmdr. Esmail Qaani and MOIS intelligence service chief Esmail Khatib.