With the Middle East as unstable as ever, the killing of three American troops in Jordan will drag the U.S. nearer to a proxy battle with Iran that Washington hopes to keep away from.
After years of making an attempt to ease tensions with Iran by dialogue, earlier than backing Israel unconditionally in its battle on Gaza with solely restricted warnings towards civilian casualties, the drone strike by Iran-backed armed teams on U.S. forces in Jordan crossed an unspoken pink line for the Biden administration.
The United States has already been hitting one other Iranian-backed group, Yemen’s Houthi rebels. The strikes come after warnings didn’t dissuade Houthi assaults on Red Sea transport, which the rebels say are acts of solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza being bombarded by U.S. ally Israel.
The White House has promised a “very consequential” response to the Jordan assault, which comes in the beginning of an election yr wherein Biden’s Republican rivals are occurring the offensive and urging direct assaults on Iran.
But the Biden administration has already said that it doesn’t need battle with Iran – the place officers have sought to distance themselves from the assault.
“It’s a fork-in-the-road moment,” mentioned Alex Vatanka, founding director of the Iran program on the Middle East Institute.
He mentioned that Iran’s purpose because the Oct. 7 Hamas incursion on Israel has been “to avoid war with Israel and the United States, but to use this opportunity to squeeze both as part of a long-term game plan.”
The clerical state is aware of that “like Iran, the United States is not interested in a regional escalation.”
But Iranian officers additionally know that, with elections approaching, “President Biden is already being hammered for being weak in the face of foreign adversaries, and that politically he has to do something.”
Iran calculus
Vatanka anticipated additional U.S. strikes on Iran’s so-called “Axis of Resistance,” with messages despatched to Iran to clarify that it can’t afford better escalation.
Thomas Warrick, a former State Department official now on the Atlantic Council, mentioned the United States had no good selections.
Iran won’t be deterred by assaults on proxies and a full-blown assault in Iraq may hand Tehran a strategic victory by strengthening requires U.S. troops to go away.
“The Iranian regime doesn’t believe in deterrence the way U.S. policymakers and strategists do,” he mentioned.
Other choices may embrace instantly concentrating on a prime navy website inside Iran or eliminating Revolutionary Guard positions in Syria, the place Israel has additionally been placing Tehran’s capacities.
“Neither of these options are good, and both risk keeping the United States embroiled in a regional conflict that the Biden administration was hoping to avoid,” he mentioned.
Hopes dim for diplomacy
In 2020, after one other flare-up with Iranian-backed teams in the beginning of an election yr, then-president Donald Trump ordered a strike on the Baghdad airport that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the storied commander of an elite Revolutionary Guards unit.
But months earlier, Trump abruptly canceled plans to strike Iran itself, cautious of escalating battle over Tehran’s capturing down of a U.S. unmanned drone.
The Biden administration took workplace searching for diplomacy with Iran, negotiating by the European Union on restoring a 2015 nuclear deal scrapped by Trump.
The talks collapsed partly over Iran’s calls for for better sanctions aid, and an settlement grew to become politically poisonous after the federal government violently cracked down on women-led protests that erupted in September 2022.
But U.S. officers since then have quietly spoken to Iran about regional tensions and – till Oct. 7 – the Biden administration had boasted that it had introduced assaults on U.S. troops all the way down to a standstill.
Now, whereas U.S. officers will not be talking within the language of regime change, Vatanka mentioned they’ve concluded {that a} “fundamental part of a solution to a large-scale sustained de-escalation in the Middle East requires a very different political order in Tehran.”
Ali Vaez, Iran undertaking director on the International Crisis Group, mentioned U.S. fatalities marked a “major step up the escalation ladder by Iran-backed groups” and that Tehran’s denials of duty carried little weight.
But he mentioned that final yr’s diplomacy had introduced calm, whereas U.S. strikes in Iraq, Syria and Yemen have solely made Iran-backed fighters extra brazen.
“While there is no political space in Washington for engagement with Iran in an election year, diplomacy is the only approach that has reined Iran in,” he mentioned.
Source: www.dailysabah.com