The killing of three U.S. soldiers and the wounding of more than 40 other American troops in Jordan by Iranian-backed proxies has led some American political leaders and observers to call for direct U.S. attacks on Iran. Joseph Epstein, writing in Newsweek, advises the Biden administration to “make Iran pay for killing Americans by striking its territory.” Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted that the U.S. should target Iranian oil or military infrastructure in Iran to respond to the attacks on American forces. President Joe Biden pledged, “We shall respond.” But both Pentagon and White House spokespersons quickly clarified that the United States was “not seeking war with Iran.”
There is no doubt that Iran, despite its protestations of innocence, is waging proxy wars against Israel and other countries in the Middle East. U.S. forces in the region both on the ground and at sea have come under attack by Iran’s proxies. As Walter Russell Mead points out in the Wall Street Journal, Iran’s confident belligerence in the Middle East is due to the “catastrophic” failure of the Biden administration’s policies there. But, as Mead notes, Biden is only the latest president to be bedeviled by the region’s conflicts. It is a region, he contends, that the U.S. can neither fix due to “[b]itter ethnic, ideological, and sectarian conflicts” nor ignore due to its energy resources.
It was the combined failures of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations that produced the environment and circumstances that diminished U.S. influence, facilitated Russia’s resurgence, opened the door to increased Chinese influence, and paved the way for Iran’s hegemonic ambitions in the region. The twin debacles of the Iraq and Afghan wars and the failures of the so-called Arab Spring combined with the steady reduction in U.S. naval power to upset the always fragile balance of power in the Middle East. President George W. Bush zealously and against all empirical evidence attempted to democratize the region. President Barack Obama infamously conducted an “apology tour” in the region to confess America’s past sins and signed a flawed “nuclear deal” with Iran. Biden’s pursuit of the futile “nuclear deal” with Iran and what Mead calls his strategy to “reach some kind of détente” with the mullahs only encouraged Iranian ambitions. Much to the chagrin of the American foreign policy establishment, of the last four U.S. presidents, Donald Trump had the most effective Middle Eastern policy, manifested by the creation of the Abraham Accords, growth of domestic energy independence, and shelving of the “nuclear deal” with Iran. (READ MORE: Can America Survive Israel’s Nuclear Destruction?)
What should America’s response be to Iran’s latest proxy attack? Those who counsel escalation should be mindful that there are undoubtedly similar voices in Russia advocating attacking NATO or U.S. targets in response to the proxy war we and our NATO allies are fighting in Ukraine. U.S. and NATO-backed Ukrainian forces are killing Russians — lots of Russians — every day with American and NATO weapons. The fact that the U.S. and NATO countries are helping Ukraine defend itself from Russian aggression will make no difference to Russia’s more hawkish observers and policymakers. It is important for proxy wars to remain proxy wars. Sometimes in international politics justice needs to give way to stability and restraint. Statesmen and policymakers earn their pay by prioritizing among competing interests and challenges to those interests. And as Walter Lippmann once warned, nations need to align their commitments to their resources. Or to put it more bluntly, as Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War when certain Cabinet members were advocating war with England, “One war at a time.”
Proxy wars are wars fought on the cheap in terms of casualties and resources. Escalate those wars, and the casualties multiply and the resources dwindle. The last thing America needs is to go to war with Iran while fighting proxy wars in the Levant and Ukraine and attempting to deter a Chinese attack or blockade of Taiwan. This kind of realism may not be emotionally satisfying or politically popular, but, to paraphrase George Washington, it is for us, not others, to decide “when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.”
