OPINION:
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Speaking at the George W. Bush Presidential Center last month, CIA Director William Burns declared that Iran’s recent unprecedented attack on Israel had “turned out to be a spectacular failure.”
With the exception of four salvos that hit Israel’s Nevatim Air Base — out of more than 300 drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles reportedly launched from Iran, everything Tehran’s forces fired was intercepted and destroyed before crossing into Israeli territory. Mr. Burns rightly lauded the quality of Israel’s military and emphasized that the Israelis “have friends starting with the United States, but others as well.”
But while Israel’s defense of its homeland was an extraordinary tactical victory, the failure to deter Iran’s first-ever strike on Israel from its own territory called into question whether Israel might have also suffered a strategic defeat, with worrisome long-term ramifications for its national security.
The failure to deter Iran, it should be noted, comes on the heels of Israel’s failure to deter Hamas and its deadly Oct. 7 attack.
Deterrence is designed to induce adversaries not to take undesirable action by manipulating the adversary’s perceived costs, benefits and risk tolerance. Preventing an enemy from attacking in the first place has long been the centerpiece of Israel’s and NATO’s defense strategy. The goal is to convince enemy decision-makers that an attack would be so unlikely to succeed or would result in such high costs that it is not worth the attempt.
Deterrence is dynamic. Nations constantly reassess their correlation of forces and test the red lines of their adversaries. What deters enemies today might not be enough to deter them tomorrow.
Iran and its terrorist proxy Hamas punctured Israel’s deterrence strategy with brazen attacks in recent months. Iran has taken its war to wipe out Israel out of the shadows.
Foreign leaders, including President Biden, counseled Israel to “take the win” from the ineffective salvo and not retaliate against Iran out of concern that it would risk igniting a dangerous cycle of escalation in a region already wracked by war and instability. But Israel had no choice but to respond with force and demonstrate that if Iran attacked Israel again, it had the capability and will to strike back at Iran.
Israeli commanders likely deliberately chose for their target the Iranian city of Isfahan, a center of missile production and the site of Iran’s nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz. Only time will tell whether Israel has reestablished escalation dominance.
Iran successfully avoided a direct war with Israel and the United States while probing and crossing established red lines. The genie is out of the bottle. Israel must adapt to an even more perilous reality in the Middle East where deterrence has taken on a new meaning.
Going forward, the U.S. should support Israel and defend our national security interests against Iran along three lines of operation.
First, effective deterrence relies on highly detailed intelligence on the plans and intentions of Iran’s leadership, which form the basis for war-gaming the new normal after Iran and Hamas transformed the deterrence landscape. The U.S. and Israel will need to continue to work ever more closely with our Gulf Arab partners to deter Iran in the future. Intelligence collection will be key to determining whether Iran’s leaders get the message.
Second, President Ronald Reagan’s strategy for deterrence famously relied on “peace through strength.” With wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East and China threatening war on Taiwan, the U.S. must focus on rebuilding its defense industrial base. We don’t need boots on the ground, but we do need to be the arsenal for democracy in support of our allies on the front lines doing the fighting.
Third, the Biden and future presidential administrations must demonstrate stricter message discipline. If our enemies perceive that our overriding goal, as the Biden administration has repeatedly stated, is to avoid escalation, then we risk sliding into a policy of appeasement, where our enemies do not believe we would impose significant costs if they ignored our warnings against action.
The stakes could not be higher. The current wars, in which we are only peripherally engaged, already have serious costs. Consider the massive shock to the world economy and our national security in the Pacific if China were to invade Taiwan. The Biden administration should build on the bipartisan consensus, which resulted in badly needed new military aid for Israel, Taiwan and Ukraine, to craft a more potent deterrence strategy.
Reagan summed it up best: “The most fundamental paradox is that if we’re never to use force, we must be prepared to use it and use it successfully.” True, but only if our adversaries believe us.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018.
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