Iran’s Risky Massive Retaliation Strategy

Last week the US and Iran were minutes away from a costly war that neither could hope to win. After more than a year of tough talk and militaristic posturing from both, Iran’s downing of a US reconnaissance drone over the Strait of Hormuz brought matters to a head, forcing the Trump administration to weigh the cost of matching its rhetoric with force. It decided the price was too high. While President Donald Trump couched his decision to abort a US limited retaliatory strike in terms of the disproportionate number of likely Iranian casualties, the unspoken truth is that the US stayed its hand because Iran made clear it would view any attack on its soil, however limited, as the initiation of a larger conflict that would put the oil infrastructure of the entire Gulf region at risk. Whether Tehran’s threat of massive retaliation will sustain its deterrent value, as the US struggles to craft a response to Iran’s anticipated breakout from limits set by the Iran nuclear deal, remains to be seen. War remains an all-too-real possibility.

Since withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in May, 2018, the Trump administration has embarked on a two-tiered policy intended to compel Iran to renegotiate that nuclear agreement. These two tiers — a so-called “maximum pressure” campaign based on stringent economic sanctions designed to cripple the Iranian economy, thereby generating domestic pressure on Tehran to accede to the US demands, and an implied threat of military action to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure should it fail to do so — have always been viewed as two distinct policy paths. The first has been implemented forcefully and has had a detrimental impact on the Iranian economy. The second has largely loomed in the background as an implicit threat should Iran fail to comply with US demands.

The fatal flaw in the US position was its failure to take into account Iranian policy formulations that view economic pressure and military threats as a single policy designed to undermine the viability of the Iranian government. While the official US policy toward Iran does not include regime change, the fact that the architect of the Trump administration’s Iran policy, National Security Adviser John Bolton, has forcefully argued for both military action against Iran and regime change adds credence to Iranian concerns.

From the Iranian perspective, the Trump administration’s policy of “maximum pressure” represented a form of economic warfare that was indistinguishable from military action, especially given that Iran was refusing to yield regarding its right to enrich uranium as enshrined in the JCPOA. Hesamoddin Ashena, an adviser to President Hassan Rouhani, made clear that the Iranians “consider war and sanctions as two sides of the same coin,” noting that the Trump administration’s calls for a negotiated settlement will fall on deaf ears so long as the US operates outside the terms of the JCPOA.

Nothing about Iran’s intransigence in the face of debilitating economic harm should have taken President Trump and his advisers by surprise. The JCPOA was the product of a massive investment in diplomacy by both the Iranian leadership and people, derived not only from difficult negotiations with the other JCPOA signatories, but also equally difficult consultations within the Iranian government, including often contentious parliamentary debates where officials were called to task about the details of the agreement.

Unlike the US, where the JCPOA took the form of an executive order by President Barack Obama that could be discarded at will by its successor, the Iranian embrace of the JCPOA was a national commitment that was not taken lightly and could not be easily altered. Any Trump administration notion that the Iranian government could simply walk away from the JCPOA was a major miscalculation.

The decision by the Trump administration this May to block two measures put in place to help keep Iran in compliance with JCPOA restrictions — one involving the export of heavy water to Oman and the other a swap with Russia of enriched for unenriched uranium — was a second miscalculation that ended up playing into Iran’s hands. The Trump administration had hoped that closing these two outlets would compel Iran to stop enriching uranium, since the inability to purge its inventories of controlled materials accumulated in excess of JCPOA caps would otherwise put Iran in violation of that agreement, thereby weakening its moral position among the international community and strengthening any US case for retaliatory measures.

Instead, Iran made it clear that it would not cease nuclear enrichment but would on the contrary advance its uranium enrichment capability by operating advanced centrifuges capable of enriching uranium more efficiently and by restarting its mothballed enrichment lines designed to produce 20% enriched uranium. The so-called “breakout window” envisioned by the JCPOA — the amount of time needed to get enough fissile material to produce a single nuclear weapon — would now shrink from a year to a few months, if not weeks. The one-year breakout window had been viewed by the Obama administration as a red line for military action prior to the finalization of the JCPOA and embraced by the Trump administration after the US withdrawal from that agreement.

US policymakers apparently believed that if Iran were to operate in violation of the JCPOA in a way that shortened the breakout window, they would be able to launch limited military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities without triggering a larger regional war. This calculation was derived in no small part from Israeli experience in Syria, where Iranian military targets were struck repeatedly, often with loss of life among Iranian military personnel, without any meaningful Iranian retaliation.

Iran has clearly differentiated between what transpires outside its borders and what takes place on its soil. Any attack on targets inside Iran will be treated as an act of war. US policymakers were aware of this reality but apparently thought that, if the scope of any US military strike inside Iran were limited, Tehran would not retaliate out of fear of an even greater response.

Iran Takes the Controls

The US has made no bones about the fact that it was planning a military strike to neutralize the Iranian nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz if Iran were to violate the JCPOA. By broadcasting its intent, the US hoped to get Iran either to back down or to accept the inevitability of the loss of Natanz without undertaking a major retaliatory strike.

From the Iranian perspective, a “wait and see” posture on its part ceded all initiative to the US and forced Iran to accept the inevitability of military action. By shooting down the US unmanned drone, Tehran compelled the US to confront the consequences of any military strike on terms dictated by Iran, not the other way around. When the Trump administration reached out to Iran via Omani intermediaries, warning of a limited retaliatory strike, Iran put the US on notice that any attack on its soil would result in massive retaliation by Iran across the region. It was this threat that forestalled any US military strike.

The US and Iran remain on a confrontation course largely dictated by Iran’s decisions regarding uranium enrichment, and the US’ willingness to use military force in response. What has changed is the lack of uncertainty regarding outcomes: If the US attacks Iran, there is no longer any question about what Iran’s response will be, and what costs will be accrued. This represents a new dynamic that influences US decision-making regarding any military strike on Iran, since the US now must be prepared for a major military engagement requiring the large-scale commitment of troops and equipment not currently deployed in the Middle East.

Iran’s policy of “massive retaliation” also invokes the notion of “mutually assured destruction” when it comes to the oil production capability of the Gulf. It is this reality that may very well lead the US and Iran away from direct military confrontation and toward a negotiated settlement. There can be no doubt what the outcome of any US-Iranian conflict would be on the global and regional economies. Whether this is enough to deter either side from any precipitous action is yet to be seen.

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