The killing of three American soldiers in Jordan and the wounding of dozens more, allegedly by an Iranian-backed group, is a red line that was always likely to be crossed in what is becoming an increasingly dangerous region.
The US had up to this weekend avoided fatalities in more than 150 attacks on its military bases by Iranian proxies since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war after the 7 October attacks, but that luck could not last for ever. The question now is what lies on the far side of that red line.
It is a scenario that has repeatedly been discussed in the Pentagon and the national security council, but decisions in reality depend on the array of circumstances at the time. Biden will now choose from a menu of options and consider the dilemma of how far to go to restore deterrence, while balancing the desire to end the open season on US positions across the Middle East with the avoidance of a head-on American-Iranian war.
A former US commander in the region said the options presented to the president would include “targets in Iran that are linked to production of munitions, for training and equipping Iran’s surrogate forces”.
There has been a chorus of demands from Republican senators and some former US generals since the attack on the Tower 22 base on the Jordan-Syria border for Biden to cut out the middle men and bomb Iran directly.
Wesley Clark, a retired general who was once Nato’s supreme commander in Europe, wrote on X: “The US should stop saying, ‘We don’t want to escalate.’ This invites them to attack us. Stop calling our strikes ‘retaliation’. This is reactive. Take out their capabilities and strike hard at the source: Iran.”
Biden will now be sensitive to accusations of weakness on the world stage as his fight for re-election – almost certainly against Donald Trump – begins in earnest. But airstrikes in Iran would be a huge step. There may well have been US covert military operations in Iran since the Islamic revolution of 1979, but never an overt strike. Trump came the closest, ordering strikes on Iran with missiles and warplanes in June 2019 in retaliation for the downing of a US drone, but he rescinded the launch order with 10 minutes to go. He said he changed his mind because of the estimated civilian casualties and the consequent risk of an all out US-Iran war.
The same concerns now weigh heavily on Biden. The region is already a battlefield, with a US-led coalition exchanging fire with Tehran-backed Houthis in Yemen, and the threat of an Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon. Any escalation in the Gulf will trigger a spike in oil prices and global inflation that would be far more damaging to the president’s re-election prospects than some name-calling from old soldiers and Republican senators.
Nicholas Heras, senior director for the strategy and innovation at the New Lines Institute in Washington, said: “The Biden administration is locked into a difficult position because senior members of the administration want to continue to pivot to competing with China in Asia and confronting Russia in Europe while not seeming to be backing down to Iran in the Middle East.”
That balance has become increasingly hard to maintain, Heras added. “The situation in the region is metastasising rapidly toward a face-off between the United States and Iran, which has been years in the making,” he said.
The principal restraining factor is the fact that neither capital believes it is in its interests to turn a succession of proxy conflicts into an all-out war.
Dina Esfandiary, a senior adviser for the Middle East at the International Crisis Group, said: “Iran can’t afford to have a multi-front war. From conversations with some officials, I firmly believe that it’s something they’re really quite frightened of, because it’s unprecedented. I’m not sure they know how to manage a full-blown conflict with the US.”
However, it remains Iranian strategy to raise the stakes of US presence in the region, arming and giving increasing free rein to its proxy militias, until Washington begins to pull out its troops. Retaliatory strikes by the US against those militias in recent months have proved an insufficient deterrent, so the pressure will be on Biden to step up the response.
One option would be to target Iranians and Iranian hardware outside Iran’s borders. At the high end of that variant would be an attack on Iranian warships supporting the Houthis in the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden. Lower down the scale would be strikes on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) bases inside Syria, including a facility known as the Glasshouse at Damascus airport, which Charles Lister, of the Middle East Institute thinktank, called the “IRGC’s most sensitive command/control facility in Syria”.
The former US commander said it was also possible that facilities of the IRGC’s expeditionary Quds force in Iraq could also be hit, but that runs the risk of further complicating an already fractious relationship with the government in Baghdad that is threatening to evict US forces in the country.
“I think it’s a particularly fraught situation with fragility in a number of these different areas,” they said. “Responding obviously is absolutely necessary, if it really does degrade the capacity and capability of these forces shooting at our bases and our soldiers. But how to do that without inflaming an already very challenging situation? I think it is very difficult.”
