The Stay Puft Marshmallow Doctrine
Something is broken in the current policy of brinksmanship with Iran, and something unusual might be needed to restore a status quo.
Yesterday, a drone thought to be launched by Iranian proxies killed three American soldiers in Jordan, on the Syrian border. All talk now is of escalation. President Joe Biden said the United States “shall respond,” adding that the response would occur “at a time and in a manner [of] our choosing.” For once I would like to hear a world leader vow to devastate the enemy in a manner and time of the enemy’s choosing. “Choose the date,” they could say, “and tell us which five of your most vital navy vessels we will turn into an artificial reef.” The model for this retribution would be the first Ghostbusters film, where a vengeful god invites the heroes to “choose the form of the destructor,” then reads Dan Aykroyd’s mind and shows up as a murderous, Godzilla-size mascot for Stay Puft Marshmallows.
My focus on the rhetoric of revenge may sound strange. But something is broken in the current doctrine of brinksmanship with Iran, and something unusual might be needed to restore a status quo, or create a new dispensation, that does not set the whole region on a course for war. The conflict in Gaza is hideous but will end. Hamas and Iran are refusing to let it end, because their only hope for a victory is for the conflict to expand and grow unmanageable for Israel, the United States, and their allies. And the current situation—where proxies inflict wounds in Jordan, Israel, Iraq, the Red Sea, and no wound stops bleeding until the next has been inflicted—will turn unmanageable slowly, then all at once.
Iran hopes that the United States will get into half a dozen unwinnable wars, then eventually give up from exhaustion. That exhaustion will come only partly from the nature of asymmetric warfare. Iranian proxies are ragtag groups, cheap to maintain and ready to die; American life and weaponry are expensive. America’s depletion will also come from the political costs of fighting a war in a region where it is hated, and associated with the even more hated Israel. Iran attacked in Jordan, where the government is friendly to America and to Israel but the population is perhaps half Palestinian. By attacking in Jordan, Iran gets to heighten that tension, and bring the Jordanian monarchy ever so slightly closer to a breaking point.
I was skeptical of the wisdom of Qassem Soleimani’s assassination when it happened in January 2020, with President Donald Trump’s finger on the trigger. The Iranian general had it coming. (Perhaps we all do—but some more than others.) The danger of escalation was too great, I thought. But after the assassination, Iran pointedly refused to retaliate in a way that would have set the region ablaze. It tried to kill Americans, but it did so on the cheap, and without success. Now the escalation is happening, because the war in Gaza is raging, and the United States wants nothing less than multiple wars raging at once. For the United States, “a time of our choosing” is definitely not now, and Iran knows it. So expect Iran’s attacks to continue.
[Graeme Wood: Two questions to ask now that Qassem Soleimani is dead]
The advantage of the Soleimani assassination was its discontinuity. It completely bypassed the predictable logic of tit for tat and went directly to identify your charred body by its gold rings for tat. It did so with a legal basis too: Soleimani was a soldier, in Iraq in the course of his duties, liaising with Iraqi proxies who were trying to kill Americans and their allies. The violence was so extreme and unpredictable that it forced Iran to doubt whether it could dictate the tempo of military escalation anymore. One could object in principle to conducting foreign policy by Hellfire missile. But it was certainly good that Iran no longer knew what wounds it might get in exchange for the wounds it inflicted.
By definition, a policy of deterrence works only when one’s enemy declines to test it. Now it is probing, probing, probing. The Houthis are seeing just how willing the United States and Europe are to fire missiles into their already wrecked country, with the sole benefit of wrecking it a little more and letting the Houthis stand defiantly on the wreckage. Hezbollah is gauging what it can get away with on the northern border of Israel. And in Iraq, the outposts of the U.S. and its Kurdish friends are on wearying high alert. If American policy was to deter, it has recently failed, visibly, and needs to be restored or replaced.
Days after Soleimani’s assassination, his successor, Esmail Ghaani, asked the world to “be patient” and await Tehran’s reply, which would take the form of “the dead bodies of Americans all over the Middle East.” This was a way of saying “at a time and place of our choosing”—more deterrence boilerplate. (“You’ll rue the day!” is another line straight from the Microsoft Word Clippy “It looks like you’re writing an empty threat” suggestion bubble.) Failing to take these threats seriously would be a grave miscalculation. But also risky is reacting to these threats in a predictable way.
Biden stocked his foreign-policy team with people who have worked tirelessly to avoid a direct confrontation with Iran, and to avoid this escalation. Now these same escalation-averse policy minds are choosing from a menu of reasonable options for escalation, including an attack on an Iranian proxy in Syria or an Iranian ship or aircraft. So far, only Republicans seem to want a strike inside Iran. But sometimes the menu of reasonable options is the problem, because Tehran knows what’s on it. We are approaching a scenario that calls, strategically, for off-menu ordering, an act of retaliation that Iran had not contemplated. If you think this is a risky practice at a restaurant, try it in the Strait of Hormuz.