Iran is already at war with America and threatens to destabilize the world. U.S. forces and bases are under fire in Iraq and Syria, having endured more than a hundred strikes by Iranian-backed militias in the past three months. Tehran-supported Houthi rebels have turned the Red Sea into a battlefield, having launched some 25 attacks on commercial vessels transiting the southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, according to the head of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command.
The disruption of traffic in the Suez Canal, one of the world’s busiest shipping routes in global trade, is sending shipping costs surging, threatening the world economy. And that is after Hamas slaughtered 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7 and Hezbollah fired more than 1,000 rocket strikes on northern Israel.
President Biden’s response? A “final warning,” issued by his administration on Wednesday, to cease attacks or face unspecified “consequences.” Biden’s strongly worded missive followed Iran’s deployment of a warship in the Red Sea, after the U.S. military sunk three Houthi boats and killed 10 militants.
Ultimatums and a mini-strike here and there will not deter Iran and its terrorist gangs. To prevent the crisis in the Middle East from reaching the boiling point and consuming the region, it is time for President Biden to switch strategy – from escalation control to escalation dominance.
Fear of escalation and of angering Iranian leaders has shaped Biden’s policy toward Tehran, with whom his administration is still hoping to renew a nuclear deal that had been broken by the Trump administration. As recently as August, Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged that the administration would “welcome any steps that Iran takes to actually deescalate the growing nuclear threat that it has posed since the United States got out of the Iran nuclear deal.”
Controlling escalation, as many analysts and pundits advocate – while it has worked in the Russia-Ukraine conflict – is a wrong strategy for Iran. Biden’s escalation management approach – i.e. restricting the quantity and type of weaponry supplied to Ukraine to fight the Russians – while having resulted in the destruction of Ukraine, has, so far, steered Russian President Vladimir Putin clear of targeting Kyiv and Europe with nuclear weapons or bringing war to the U.S. homeland.
Iran is an entirely different kind of adversary. While Russia is capable of destroying the United States, Iran has no such capability. In contrast to Moscow’s nuclear arsenal of almost 6,000 warheads, the world’s largest, Iran, officially, is yet to have a viable nuclear weapon.
Iran is not afraid of Biden’s pinprick strategy because it is confident in its ability to outplay the United States in the asymmetric warfare domain. Tehran has been seeking to unbalance Washington by waging a protracted low-intensity military confrontation against our forces through the so-called “Axis of Resistance” – an informal network of more than a dozen militant partners across the Middle East. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) and the elite Qods Force, which supplies these proxies with weapons, has demonstrated a level of technical sophistication, having enabled proxy strikes with missiles, UAVs and, most recently, an armed unmanned surface drone, which Houthis launched to attack commercial vessels in the Red Sea just hours after the White House and several U.S. Allies issued a “final” warning.
As Iran modernizes its own military hardware, IRGC trains and equips its proxies with upgraded weaponry. On Sunday, the Israeli Defense Forces revealed that they had uncovered evidence that Hamas terrorists were learning, under Iranian guidance, “how to operate and build precision missile production components and strategic weapons.” President Biden cannot afford to wait until Iranian proxies have mastered precision-strike warfare, threatening US forces and civilians with more accurate targeting and increased lethality. He must act now.
To strike the U.S. where it hurts, Iran has been deepening its expertise in cyberwarfare – including the targeting of U.S. critical infrastructure – and developing “surrogate networks inside the United States” for more than a decade in order to conduct proxy attacks on U.S. citizens, according to the 2023 Annual Threat Assessment issued in March by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Iran’s regime and its proxies already have attempted assassinations on our soil, including that of a U.S. citizen.
The only way to deter Iran is to demonstrate to the arrogant ayatollahs a credible threat of direct head-to-head kinetic confrontation with the overwhelmingly superior U.S. military. Biden can do this by employing “escalation dominance,” a concept that underpinned the U.S. nuclear doctrine during the Cold War, but has since been applied to non-nuclear warfare. Originally developed to deter the Soviet Union from launching a nuclear strike on the United States, escalation dominance aims to shatter the adversary’s confidence in its ability to win.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM REBEKAH KOFFLER
H/T Fox News (read more at FoxNews.com)
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