U.S. seeks to deter Iran and its Resistance Axis

Iranian-backed militias have launched more than 45 attacks on U.S. bases in the Middle East in the last five weeks since the Palestinian militant group Hamas carried out a deadly terror assault on Israel — prompting the Pentagon and White House to question whether their strategy for deterring Tehran is working.

The strikes on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria, in support of the Iran-backed, trained and funded Hamas, came despite the deployment of U.S. carrier strike groups to the Mediterranean and Red Seas and three reprisal strikes against what the Pentagon says are operational facilities controlled by Iran’s elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), in Syria. On Sunday, the U.S. hit an IRGC-controlled weapons depot and command-and-control center in eastern Syria, killing at least eight fighters, according to an outside war monitor.

“These attacks must stop, and if they don’t stop, then we won’t hesitate to do what’s necessary, again, to protect the troops,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said Monday in South Korea, suggesting the Pentagon could take more military action against Iran and its proxies.

A number of current and former U.S. officials told Semafor that they’re worried that the Pentagon’s calibrated responses to the attacks are weakening the U.S.’s redlines and deterrence in the Mideast and only encouraging Tehran and its proxies to take more risks. Iran’s allied Houthi army in Yemen has fired a string of long range missiles and attack drones at Israel since October 7. And Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, perhaps Tehran’s most powerful military proxy, is engaging in regular border skirmishes with the Israel Defense Forces.

These U.S. officials argued that the Pentagon — while stopping short of attacking Iran directly — should much more aggressively seek to neutralize the IRGC’s military infrastructure in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, while also conducting cyber operations to disrupt Tehran’s military operations outside Iran.

“If we have this concept of military deterrence, the one thing about the concept is that it’s a self-grading homework assignment,” said Mick Mulroy, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East during the Trump administration. “If they [Iran] keep striking us, and they keep intensifying the strikes, then deterrence just isn’t working. There’s no other way to put it.”

The Trump administration assassinated Iran’s and the IRGC’s most powerful military commander, Brigadier General Qassem Soleimani, in a 2020 drone strike in Iraq, which Iranian officials have vowed to avenge.

But senior Biden administration and Israeli officials reject the idea that Tehran isn’t constrained. They said their priority right now is to allow the Israel Defense Force (IDF) to focus on its military campaign against Hamas — which is aimed at essentially uprooting the organization from Gaza — without allowing Iran and its other proxies to enter the battle in a major way.

They said the proxy attacks, while troubling, aren’t impacting Israel’s overall mission. And they point to two major speeches given this month by Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in which he signaled that he wasn’t going to escalate in any major way, as a sign Tehran is limiting its allies’ operations.

“I think, yes, we are confronting the proxies of the Iranians, but the Iranians are using them in a very, very cautious way,” said Yaakov Amidror, a former national security advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I think it is wrong to say that the Iranians are not deterred by the combination of Israel and the Americans.”