As a scholar of security studies who has researched conflicts in the Middle East for over 20 years , I would argue that a decade of U.S. foreign policy in the region has failed to contain Iran’s ambitions and has instead substantially contributed to the current escalation.
As is clear from recent events along Israel’s northern border , Washington’s ability to project power and manage American interests in the Mideast has eroded so dramatically since 2010 that Iran has only limited concerns about the consequences of its proxies attacking U.S. forces and directly attacking U.S. allies such as Israel.
Iranian victories
The government of Iran, a Shia Muslim nation in a Sunni Muslim region, expands its regional influence by funding and militarily supporting violent proxy organizations in neighboring countries. Those groups, in turn, attack and destabilize those nations .
Misconceptions, containment and oversimplified diplomacy
Despite Iran’s many recent military and political advances over the past decade, the American government has consistently underestimated its ambitions of regional dominance. Simultaneously, in my assessment, it has overvalued the effectiveness of long-standing U.S. “ soft power ” policies toward Iran: containment and de-escalation .
To avoid escalating conflict in the Mideast, Washington prioritizes actions that will avoid, at almost any cost, any military confrontation with Iran. Instead, to contain Iran’s expanding regional influence , the U.S. has banned arms sales and technology to Iran, imposed stringent economic sanctions, frozen Iranian financial assets and diplomatically isolated its government.
Yet, Iran’s influence continues to expand. In my assessment, this indicates that containment and de-escalation cannot deter a regime whose core policies are driven by fundamentalist ideology. Iran’s leaders invoke religious convictions to justify their commitment to violent struggle, regional superiority and the destruction of Israel.
“Allah willing, there will be no such thing as a Zionist regime in 25 years,” said Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei , in 2015, calling the fight to annihilate Israel a matter of “jihadi morale.”
I consider diplomacy, negotiation and legal and economic punishments preferable solutions for most global conflicts. Yet modern history shows that these measures cannot force policy change on nondemocratic, fundamentalist regimes that flout the rules of global international relations – think Nazi Germany , North Korea and the Afghan Taliban regime .
How not to deal with proxies
My scholarship on terrorist groups suggests that the U.S. has erred in its handling of Iran’s proxies, too. Rather than addressing them together as part of a hostile network, the U.S. treats each proxy as an isolated actor operating in a specific place and seeks to contain or de-escalate that particular threat.
In Iraq, the U.S. was long willing to overlook that Iran was backing the Iraqi Shia militias battling the Islamic State group, as long as these forces continued to participate in the war on the Islamic State . Ignoring the long-term consequences of their growing strength has come at a cost: In the past year, those Iraqi militias have attacked numerous American military bases in the region .
All these failed foreign policies have culminated in the collapse of American deterrence in the Middle East. Simply put, the U.S. no longer projects enough power there to stop Iranian hostilities.
The U.S., which rallied Israel’s allies across the Mideast to shoot down most of the Iranian missiles, again preferred to block a meaningful response. The Biden administration declared the fact that few missiles hit Israel to be a “win” and insisted that the U.S. would not join Israel in any retaliation against Iran .
For months, the U.S. had pressured Israel to adopt more precision-based military operations to avoid further civilian casualties in the Gaza war, which had killed nearly 40,000 people in its first six months. Yet when Israel apparently finally did that, eliminating specific terrorists responsible for killing Israelis and Americans, American policymakers fretted that such cross-border attacks could lead to regional escalation.
If the U.S. seeks to achieve long-term peace in the Middle East, it must first acknowledge the failures of the past decade. The evidence backs my conclusion that Iran is an enemy that cannot simply be deterred, contained or de-escalated.
This article is republished from The Conversation , a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Arie Perliger , UMass Lowell
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