Is Israel Moving Down the Learning Curve? Is the United States?

Will the latest response to Iran's missile attack be the end of it?

Photo by Taylor Brandon on Unsplash

Earlier this week the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World expressed a wee bit of pessimism about the ratcheting up of Israeli-Iranian tensions following Tehran’s missile attack on Israel:

What concerns me is that the key decision-maker in all of this remains Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, a politician who was unpopular before the October 7th Hamas attack and has become even more unpopular since the attack. Netanyahu is a political survivor über alles and Iran has just thrown him a lifeline….

Benjamin Netanyahu will always try to gamble for his political resurrection even if the odds are long. A larger war with Iran would be one of those risky gambits….

I could very well be wrong…. And if I am, I will be happy to acknowledge Israel acted in a strategically savvy manner. But let’s be honest: that would represent a fundamental change in how Netanyahu’s government has behaved over the past year. And I just do not see that happening.

Four days later — after ruling out an immediate response on Monday — it would appear that Israel has retaliated with an attack in Isfahan late Thursday evening. CNN described it as “a potentially dangerous escalation in a fast widening Middle East conflict,” and that “tensions across the Middle East remain on a knife edge.” That sounds exactly like my worst fears being realized.

It does seem, however, as though the CNN’s framing of the attack is an outlier. Reuters’ Parisa Hafezi and James Mackenzie reported, “Tehran played down the incident and indicated it had no plans for retaliation - a response that appeared gauged towards averting region-wide war. The limited scale of the attack and Iran's muted response appeared to signal a successful effort by diplomats who have been working to avert all-out war since an Iranian drone and missile attack on Israel last Saturday.”

This matches what other news outlets, like the New York Times’ Patrick Kingsley, are reporting:

The relatively limited scope of Israel’s overnight strikes on Iran, and a subdued response from Iranian officials, may have lowered the chances of an immediate escalation in fighting between the two countries, analysts said Friday….

When it finally came early on Friday, Israel’s strike appeared less damaging than expected, allowing Iranian officials and state-run news outlets to downplay its significance, at least at first.

Iranian officials said that no enemy aircraft had been detected in Iranian airspace and that the main attack — on a military base in central Iran — had been initiated by small unmanned drones that were likely launched from inside Iranian territory. The nature of the attack even had precedent: Israel used similar methods in an attack on a military facility in Isfahan early last year.

By sunrise, Iranian state-run news outlets were projecting a swift return to normality, broadcasting footage of calm street scenes, while officials publicly dismissed the impact of the attack. Airports were also reopened, after a brief overnight closure.

Analysts cautioned that any outcome was still possible. But the initial Iranian reaction suggested that Iran’s leaders would not rush to respond, despite warning in recent days that they would react forcefully and swiftly to any Israeli strike.

“The way they present it to their own people, and the fact that the skies are open already, allows them to decide not to respond,” said Sima Shine, a former head of research for the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, and an Iran expert.

But, she added, “We have made so many evaluation mistakes that I am very hesitant to say it definitively.”

Shine’s last sentence is undeniably correct and reinforced by the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen: “From the outset, this crisis has shown how badly Iran and Israel understand each other. Both miscalculated, deepening the crisis.”

Or check out the exhaustive New York Times story about the Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate:

Israel was mere moments away from an airstrike on April 1 that killed several senior Iranian commanders at Iran’s embassy complex in Syria when it told the United States what was about to happen.

Israel’s closest ally had just been caught off guard.

Aides quickly alerted Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser; Jon Finer, the deputy national security adviser; Brett McGurk, Mr. Biden’s Middle East coordinator; and others, who saw that the strike could have serious consequences, a U.S. official said. Publicly, U.S. officials voiced support for Israel, but privately, they expressed anger that it would take such aggressive action against Iran without consulting Washington.

The Israelis had badly miscalculated, thinking that Iran would not react strongly, according to multiple American officials who were involved in high-level discussions after the attack, a view shared by a senior Israeli official. On Saturday, Iran launched a retaliatory barrage of more than 300 drones and missiles at Israel, an unexpectedly large-scale response, if one that did minimal damage.

The events made clear that the unwritten rules of engagement in the long-simmering conflict between Israel and Iran have changed drastically in recent months, making it harder than ever for each side to gauge the other’s intentions and reactions.

Yeah, to be blunt here, I don’t think this was so much a mutual miscalculation as a screw-up by Israel. Without in any way condoning what Quds Force or the IRGC are doing in Syria, Israel’s unilateral decision to treat the Iranian consulate as not, like, a real consulate seems to have been the big error. No one, including Israel’s allies, accepted that move as valid. Oh, and Israel’s failure to properly consult with the United States before launching the strike? Also a piss-poor decision by the Netanyahu government!

Iran’s reaction to Israel’s latest counterstrike seems muted, and it would appear that for now, that will be that. Israel and Iran will continue their unspoken proxy war as before. Maybe, after this interaction, both Iran and Israel will have learned something about how not to start a general Middle East war.

And yet, this is a problem that is going to persist. Suzanne Maloney’s latest in Foreign Affairs makes it clear that Iran is going to be a growing and not ebbing problem:

Iran’s Islamic regime aimed to inspire copycat religious uprisings after its own 1979 revolution, and to many observers, it may appear to have failed. Indeed, the conventional wisdom in Washington and elsewhere has often held that Iran has become contained, even isolated. But this was never true. Instead, Tehran developed a calculated strategy to empower proxy militias and to influence operations in its neighborhood while maintaining plausible deniability—a scheme whose canniness was vindicated by the devastating scope of Hamas’s assault and subsequent attacks by Iranian-affiliated militias in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen.

The post–October 7 strategic landscape in the Middle East is one that was largely created by Iran and that plays to its strengths. Tehran sees opportunity in chaos. Iranian leaders are exploiting and escalating the war in Gaza to elevate their regime’s stature, weaken and delegitimize Israel, undermine U.S. interests, and further shape the regional order in their favor. The truth is that the Islamic Republic is now in a better position than ever to dominate the Middle East, including by attaining the ability to disrupt shipping at multiple critical chokepoints.

Left unchecked, the dramatic expansion of Iran’s influence would have a catastrophic impact on Israel, the wider region, and the global economy. To disrupt this amplification of Iranian power, Biden urgently needs to articulate and then implement a clear strategy to protect Palestinian civilians from bearing the brunt of Israel’s military operations, counter Iran’s corrosive war-by-proxy strategy, and blunt the capabilities of Tehran’s accomplices. Achieving these goals will require a tricky set of moves by Washington, and Americans are weary of the military, economic, and human toll of their country’s commitments in the Middle East. But no world power other than the United States has the military and diplomatic capacity to frustrate Iran’s most destructive ambitions by managing the spiraling conflict between Israel and Hamas and containing its most devastating long-term consequences.

Maloney is correct — this is a heavy lift and yet the U.S. is really the only actor capable of doing it. Will the Biden administration be up to the task? Politico’s Nahal Toosi is pessimistic on Biden’s strategy — or lack thereof — in dealing with Iran:

When I asked the U.S. official what President Joe Biden’s Iran strategy is, I was immediately met with laughter. Then, the official said, “You know, a lot of people inside the administration ask that same question. Sometimes they ask it on the first day. Sometimes they ask it six months later.”

I have an answer for them: There is no Biden strategy for Iran….

For most of Biden’s time as president, his aides’ No. 1 goal hasn’t been to solve this puzzle, but to keep it off the president’s desk.

“The strategy is to keep it on low boil on all fronts — nuclear, regional, whatever. That’s been the approach for some time now,” said a second U.S. official, who, like several other people I spoke to for this column, is familiar with U.S. Middle East policy and was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

I get that running for re-election occupies a lot of the White House’s time. And I definitely get that it easy for folks like Toosi or myself to criticize from the sidelines. But Maloney is correct that Iran has been willing to put in the costly long-term investments to exert influence in the region. It required patience and a willingness to pay a high price in the form of a heavily sanctioned economy, but Tehran did it.

The ball is in Biden’s court now. It looks like the immediate crisis has passed. But his team needs to start thinking now about how to change the long-term calculus of power in a region that most Americans would rather forget.

That ain’t easy. But it has to be done.