Just hours after Sunday’s deadly drone attack by suspected Iran-backed militants on a U.S. military outpost in Jordan left three U.S. service members dead and more than 30 wounded, a familiar chorus of hawks began calling—once again—for the Biden administration to bomb Iran.
Just hours after Sunday’s deadly drone attack by suspected Iran-backed militants on a U.S. military outpost in Jordan left three U.S. service members dead and more than 30 wounded, a familiar chorus of hawks began calling—once again—for the Biden administration to bomb Iran.
First it was Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. “Hit Iran now,” he tweeted. “Hit them hard.”
Graham’s Senate colleague John Cornyn was even more blunt. “Target Tehran,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
And Sen. Tom Cotton said that anything less than hitting Iran directly “will confirm Joe Biden as a coward unworthy of being commander-in-chief.”
The Biden administration said in a statement on Sunday that U.S. intelligence had already determined that the drone strike was orchestrated by “radical Iran-backed militant groups” in Syria and Iraq. The Associated Press reported on Monday that groups in Iraq were specifically responsible, and a coalition of Iran-backed militias called the Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed on Sunday that it had targeted U.S. personnel in the vicinity, but it did not explicitly confirm that it had carried out this specific attack.
Iran said it had “no connection and had nothing to do” with the strike, stating that decisions by so-called “resistance groups” in the region to attack U.S. forces are made by the groups on their own. However, Iran remains the primary backer of such groups, and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps maintains close ties with them.
For weeks, the Biden administration has tried to use a limited approach to stop attacks by Iran-backed militants in Iraq and Syria—who have targeted U.S. service members in those countries 165 times since October, according to one U.S. official—in an effort to prevent the conflict in the Middle East, which has already expanded beyond the Gaza Strip to include southern Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria, from escalating into a full-fledged regional war. In response, the Biden administration has responded with eight rounds of airstrikes on Iranian proxies in Iraq and Syria since October, and a similar number of strikes against the Iran-backed Houthi rebel group in Yemen.
Now, under immense pressure in Washington after the deadliest attack on U.S. service members in the region in four years, Biden himself appears to be indicating that the status quo of limited strikes on Iranian-backed militia bases in Iraq and Syria and shooting Houthi missiles off of their launchers in Yemen is not going to cut it anymore.
“We had a tough day last night in the Middle East. We lost three brave souls in an attack on one of our bases,” Biden said at an event in South Carolina on Sunday. “And we shall respond.”
But how might Biden do so? As the U.S. Defense Department draws up military plans for Biden to consider, Foreign Policy talked to a range of former officials and experts about what his options are. They outlined three potential ways forward: striking inside Iran, hitting Iranian targets in the region, or pursuing diplomacy.
In the wake of Sunday’s drone strike on Tower 22, a remote U.S. desert logistics hub in Jordan located near its borders with both Iraq and Syria that is used to help coordinate the fight against the Islamic State, Biden’s critics converged on a similar line of attack: In keeping strikes against Iranian proxies limited to ensure that military tensions in the Middle East didn’t escalate, the Biden administration actually allowed Iran to set the table for further escalation.
And some former U.S. military officials are insistent that comprehensive strikes inside Iran itself are the only way to send the message to Tehran to knock it off.
“We’ve allowed ourselves to come to a point where now, direct strikes on Iran are what is required to quell this activity,” said John Miller, a retired three-star Navy admiral who previously commanded the U.S. Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf. “In true Iranian fashion, they’re going to push and push and push, until they sense that they’ve come to a red line. They do that themselves. They do it through their proxies. Well, they crossed the red line. They need to be held to account for that.”
Miller said the United States should lead strikes inside Iran that degrade the economic interests of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as well as its ability to ship weapons overseas. And he said that the United States should put in place sanctions that further cripple Iran’s ability to export oil.
“It can’t just be a one-for-one tit for tat—if you kill our folks, we’re going to strike back,” Miller said. “That doesn’t deter them, especially when dealing with proxies, because the Iranians are willing to fight to the last proxy.”
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Not everyone believes in the need to strike inside Iran for the United States to reestablish deterrence. Nathan Sales, a former State Department coordinator for counterterrorism during the Trump administration, said that there’s a long track record of the United States telling Iran to curb its provocations by striking high-value Iranian assets in the region.
Sales pointed to Operation Praying Mantis, the Reagan administration’s April 1988 campaign of strikes on Iranian vessels in the Persian Gulf after a guided missile frigate hit a Tehran-laid mine days earlier.
And more recently, he said, the January 2020 U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian Quds Force Commander Qassem Suleimani and Popular Mobilization Forces commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis at Baghdad Airport was enough to get Iran to mostly back down from a tit-for-tat campaign against U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria.
“In the 1980s, Reagan sank the Iranian Navy, [and] we didn’t hear from Iran much after that for a while,” Sales said. “We smoked Suleimani and Mohandis in 2020, and Iran’s response was to lash out with a couple of ballistic missile strikes on our soldiers in Iraq and Syria. And then it got quiet.”
The Biden administration started its term in office with a determined diplomatic effort to revive U.S. participation in the Iran nuclear deal after then-President Donald Trump exited the pact in 2018. Even when those talks dried up, until Hamas’s attack into Israel territory last October, the U.S. administration believed that diplomatic efforts to normalize ties between Israel and the Gulf states would put the Middle East on track for an untold era of peace and prosperity. And when China brokered a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran in March 2023, some Biden administration officials welcomed it despite ongoing U.S.-China competition, seeing it as a positive move that could lead to regional de-escalation.
Now, some experts believe that the calls for U.S. military retaliation against Tehran risk derailing the Biden administration’s efforts to find a diplomatic solution to end the Israel-Hamas conflict and de-escalate tensions with Iran. And they’re urging the Biden administration to take a step back from the red button and a step toward the bargaining table.
“Ultimately, you need to get to some kind of modus vivendi of which Iran is a part,” said Matt Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank, who also served as a former foreign-policy advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders. Though, he added, “I’m not going to try to pretend this is simple.”
Duss said that in addition to getting back to the bargaining table for a new Iran deal, the United States should also continue to push for a legitimate two-state solution to end the Israel-Palestine conflict and put conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel in light of its bloody war in the Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 25,000 Palestinians.
“This is an opportunity for Biden to shift and really start to get behind a consistent approach to human rights, to democracy, to accountable government and to international humanitarian law,” Duss added.
Is there a risk to the Biden administration going too big, or too small? What is just right?
No one Foreign Policy talked to thought that the Biden administration was considering large-scale strikes on Tehran or something that would take out Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But there’s a risk calculus for Tehran here, too. Sales, the former State Department counterterrorism chief, said that Iran is trying to avoid open war with the United States at all costs. “They know that if they engage in open conflict with the United States, that is existential to the regime,” he said.
Some worry that going too big—striking inside of Iran—could put the U.S. into a hot war with Tehran. “Let’s be honest—there have been people in this town who have been hot for a war with Iran for, you know, 20 years,” Duss said.
Others insist that the price of inaction is even greater. Miller, the former U.S. Fifth Fleet commander, said that without striking Iranian soil, the United States is likely to continue to see Iranian proxies target international shipping in the Red Sea and choke points such as the Bab el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz, which has forced many Western companies to instead take the 4,000-mile detour around the Horn of Africa. And, he said, they will keep up the pressure on U.S. troops.
“What are the effects when we don’t do anything?” Miller said. “We’re already learning what those are.”
And while others think that Iran can be deterred without U.S. strikes on its soil, there is still a high risk of a U.S. response that is seen as feckless. “That is an open invitation to Tehran to continue to attack Americans,” Sales said. “And we’re going to be seeing more flag draped caskets coming home to Dover [Air Force Base].”
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