Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, spoke to an August 5 Middle East Forum Podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
For the past four decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has waged a shadow war against both Israel and America. Due to “an erosion of deterrence” and the threat of the regime’s “escalating nuclear program,” we have reached a tipping point. The Iranian regime “has been able to allow itself a limited war option while denying others a limited war option against it.” This new development is an “evolution in the strategic thinking of the Islamic Republic.”
For the last two decades, Iran has been “home to the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East.” The arsenal has grown in its “lethality, range, precision, maneuverability, and reliability,” and with its growth, “the threshold to use [it] has been diminishing.” Earlier this year, the Islamic Republic launched “more precise ballistic missiles” in military operations against Pakistan and Israel – two nuclear armed countries. The missile attack against Israel on April 13 exemplified the regime’s strategy “of death by a thousand cuts, but on steroids now.” The cost for the West to track, intercept, and destroy the missiles far exceeds the cost of the inexpensive missiles.
For the past four decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has waged a shadow war against both Israel and America.
The mullahs underwrite “the next cycle of escalation” by adeptly managing the politics of missile strikes and framing them “as in response to something.” The most recent example of this is their threat to avenge Israel’s assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’s political bureau, in Tehran. The regime has eschewed diplomatic mediation, instead “talking very publicly about another public military operation.”
The term “bloodlust” is repeated in the hardline Iranian press to overtly and directly respond to the “very public humiliation imposed on them by the killing of one major head of an element of the axis of resistance” from a pre-planted bomb in an ostensible safehouse. The Iranian media have pushed back hard against the “narrative of security force penetration,” rejecting the notion that “this was a botched security force issue” and reporting instead that Haniyeh was killed by an externally fired “seven-kilogram warhead.”
Regime elites promote this false narrative because, over the past decade and a half, Iran has been plagued by covert activity on its soil resulting in the deaths of Iranian nuclear scientists, missile engineers, and a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The range of attacks include cyber-attacks against critical infrastructure, kinetic attacks on drone storage units, the Stuxnet virus, and the “theft of the nuclear archive by the Israelis way back in 2018.” The only force the mullahs have effectively mustered within Iran is the “mass grotesque domestic suppression” of street protesters and reformers.
The regime’s use of “overt and direct weapons of war” could have been “tamped down” had American and Israeli deterrence “been functioning at the highest level.” Instead, the Biden administration has taken a “conflicted course” pursuing “de-escalation and diplomacy” on the one hand, and “deterrence” on the other. “You cannot achieve these two things at once” because “you may need to climb the escalation ladder to really cement that deterrence.”
Exacerbating the problem is Biden’s policy of “unenforced oil sanctions,” which has “generate[d] significant revenues” for the mullahs. The Iranian regime is calculating that in “a scenario that could lead to a significant escalation, the Americans would come down harder on the partner that was their ally rather than the partner that was their adversary so as to stem the escalation spiral. That continues to be borne out in the rhetoric of the Biden administration today.”
It is a dubious political situation when an adversary like the Islamic Republic can count on the Great Satan to restrain the Little Satan.
The threat of Iran’s nuclear escalation, combined with the prospect of a wider regional war, could well “handcuff Israel. And it is a dubious political situation when an adversary like the Islamic Republic, who calls America the Great Satan, can also count on said Great Satan to restrain said Little Satan, which is Israel in the parlance of the Islamic Republic.” Any American effort to restrain Israel will only give the Islamic regime a “deterrent dividend.”
The regime is attempting to coordinate “different attack vectors” against Israel by layering its proxies to attack the Jewish state. With their medium-range ballistic missiles and anti-ship ballistic missiles, the Houthis in Yemen possess “game-changing long-range strike capabilities.” The Lebanese Hezbollah and Iran-backed Shia militias in Iraq possess a variety of short-range ballistic missiles and attack drones. The regime has vowed to up the ante from its hours-long attack on April 13 to an operation lasting several days through a series of “precision fires wars” throughout the region. “Lulling you into a false sense of security and then escalating again and then lulling you.”
In the waning days of the Trump administration, Israel’s transfer to U.S. CENTCOM (Central Command) in 2020 enabled greater “interoperability,” image sharing, and the ability to garner European and Arab partners “to deny these Iranian projectiles.” Given the potential for a region-wide conflict, America has moved thousands of U.S. service personnel into the region and increased its “air and missile defense assets.” However, “if there is no deterrence by punishment to follow that deterrence by denial,” the West will likely face a repeat performance by the Islamic Republic “to push its strategy forward.”
