We believe President Trump made a mistake in pulling back at the last minute from responding militarily to two months of increasingly hostile actions against the US and its allies by Iran and its proxies. These attacks culminated in the shooting down of a sophisticated US Global Hawk surveillance drone over international waters. The drone was on duty to protect commercial shipping, especially oil tankers, from attacks by Iran’s navy.
Iran has been in a state of low-level hostilities with the US since the 1979 Iranian Revolution and has caused the death of hundreds of US soldiers and citizens over the years — with little military payback from the US.
On Thursday, President Trump told the press that he thought the downing of the US drone was unintentional, but this claim was quickly refuted by Iran’s celebration of the drone’s destruction. The president’s stated relief that only military property but no US lives were affected betrays ignorance of the military importance of the drone. His comment was also, in effect, an invitation as to what kind of attacks the Iranians could carry out without expecting serious retaliation.
Any military attack on the US — and all the more so, a pattern of such attacks — requires a military response — not just more sanctions.
The president said he was seeking a “proportionate” response — one not, in this case, putting Iranian lives at risk. While avoiding unnecessary civilian casualties is desirable, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) soldiers who might have been the collateral casualties of a US retaliatory attack are combatants, not civilians. Deterrence of an enemy practicing low-level asymmetrical warfare requires a disproportionate response, contrary to the president. It is the fear of a disproportionate response — one that inflicts serious harm and pain — that deters, not tit-for-tat low-level responses measured out in spoonfuls. Significant degrading of the IRGC’s radar installations, navy, and perhaps some of its economic assets would have sent the right message.
The background
President Trump’s domestic opponents are blaming the president for Iran’s hostilities, but he had good reason to exit his predecessor’s Iran agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). It was a bad agreement that threw a life preserver to Iran at just the point that US and UN sanctions were bringing the mullahs to their knees. President Obama didn’t even have the integrity to submit the JCPOA to the Senate for ratification as a treaty, which it clearly was. Republicans at the time warned both the Europeans and Iranians that the JCPOA would likely be repudiated by a succeeding Republican administration. President Trump rightly did just that shortly after his 2016 election.
As a consequence of the new president’s withdrawal from the JCPOA and his revival of strong international sanctions against Iran, the mullah’s economy is once again on the ropes. The escalating attacks by Iran and its proxies since May represent the mullahs’ wager that escalating attacks on the 30% of the world’s oil supply passing through the Strait of Hormuz will bring widespread international pressure on the US to lift its sanctions against Iran.
Michael G. Vickers, a former special forces and CIA operations officer who served as assistant secretary of defense for special operations, low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities (2007-2011) and then as undersecretary of defense for intelligence (2011-2015), writes:
President Trump warned Iranian President Hassan Rouhani last July in an all-caps tweet that if Iran ever threatened the United States again, it would “suffer severe consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before.” Iran’s attack Thursday on a U.S. surveillance drone that was flying in international airspace, according to U.S. Central Command, should make it abundantly clear that the Iranians didn’t take him seriously.
Iran’s shoot-down of the RQ-4 Global Hawk — which has a wingspan of 131 feet and costs more than $100 million — is the third act of aggression against U.S. military aircraft in two weeks, according to the Pentagon. It followed the downing of another U.S. surveillance drone by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels on June 6 in Yemen and a failed attack by Iran’s military on a U.S. drone flying over the Gulf of Oman on June 13.
Opinion editorial, Washington Post, June 21, 2019, “To avoid a wider war, Iran must be deterred with limited U.S. military strikes.”
The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial published today, had a similar reaction:
Iran Calls Trump’s Bluff
The President is caught between hawkish goals and dovish means.… Squeezed by the U.S. “maximum pressure” campaign, Iran’s rulers are trying to pressure Mr. Trump in return. In recent weeks they have attacked oil pipelines, mined oil tankers, and this week brazenly shot down a $130 million U.S. drone monitoring shipping lanes over international waters. Iran’s bet is that Mr. Trump is so averse to military confrontation that he will ease U.S. sanctions. On the evidence of the aborted mission, they may be right.
…[C]redibility is crucial to deterrence. The more that adversaries think Mr. Trump’s threats of force aren’t credible, the more they will seek to exploit that knowledge.
After Barack Obama failed to enforce his “red line” in Syria in 2013, adversaries soon took advantage. Vladimir Putin snatched Crimea from Ukraine and moved into Syria, China pushed further into the South China Sea, and Iran expanded its proxy wars in the Middle East. Will they draw similar license now from Mr. Trump’s stand-down?
The anti-Teddy Roosevelt?
Hostile leaders in Venezuela, North Korea, China, Russia, Turkey, and Cuba are watching the Mideast events. They are concluding that Trump speaks loudly and carries a small stick — a kind of anti-Theodore Roosevelt.
Iran has a long history of continuing attacks against the US when it finds that there is little cost in doing so. Syria’s Bashir Assad had a similar reaction to US non-retaliation when it infiltrated anti-US jihadists into Iraq during the second US-Iraq war; similarly Pakistan as it continued (and still continues) supporting the Taliban.
President Trump is right to want to extricate the US from endless no-win wars in the Mideast and Afghanistan and to de-emphasize those regions relatively. But to de-emphasize is not to abandon and telegraph that abandonment to an enemy. It is not in the US strategic interest to let Iran become the hegemon — the leading power — in the Mideast. If Iran does achieve that status and strengthens its de facto alliance with Russia, China, North Korea, and Pakistan — all nuclear powers — the US and its European and Japanese allies will be in very serious strategic trouble.
Both the president and his base need to spend less time on Twitter and more time mastering the basics of international relations theory.
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