The escalation of the Israeli-Iranian conflict in recent months is often described as a further extension of Israel's war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. After all, Hamas has close ties to Iran and the two share the goal of eliminating the Jewish state.
But that's not all.
As a security scholar who has studied Middle East conflicts for over two decades, I would argue that a decade of U.S. foreign policy in the region has failed to contain Iranian ambitions and has instead contributed significantly to the current escalation of tensions.
As recent events along Israel's northern border make clear, America's ability to project power and manage its interests in the Middle East has declined dramatically since 2010, and Iran is less concerned about the consequences of its proxies attacking U.S. forces or directly attacking U.S. allies such as Israel.
Iranian victory
The Iranian government, a Shiite Muslim country in a Sunni Muslim region, is expanding its influence in the region by providing financial and military support to violent proxies in neighboring countries, which in turn attack and destabilize those countries.
It is no exaggeration to say that over the past decade, this sophisticated strategy has made Iran the most influential superpower in the Middle East.
Until the early 2010s, Iran's only real base in the region was Hezbollah, the Shiite political and military organization it nurtured in Lebanon in the early 1980s. Today, Iran's allies include Houthi rebels in Yemen and a loyal network of Shiite militias in Iraq.
In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad has authorized Iran's elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to establish a large military presence.
Since Hamas invaded Israel and the Gaza war began on Oct. 7, 2023, these groups have directly attacked Israel, U.S. military bases, and U.S. civilian assets in the region more than 170 times. The political and military sovereignty of Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq has been violated to the extent that some U.S. officials consider them Iranian puppet regimes.
During that same period, Iran's military nuclear program reached its most advanced stage. In July 2024, six years after the Trump administration withdrew from an international nuclear deal aimed at slowing Iran's weapons development, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that Iran could within weeks be able to equip its vast and growing ballistic missile arsenal with nuclear warheads.
Misunderstanding, Containment, and Oversimplified Diplomacy
Despite Iran's military and political advances over the past decade, Washington has consistently underestimated Iran's regional ambitions. At the same time, in my assessment, the United States has overestimated the effectiveness of its long-standing “soft power” policy toward Iran – containment and de-escalation.
To avoid escalating conflict in the Middle East, Washington has prioritized actions that avoid military conflict with Iran at all costs. Instead, to limit Iran's growing regional influence, the United States has banned arms and technology sales to Iran, imposed severe economic sanctions, frozen Iranian financial assets, and diplomatically isolated the Iranian government.
But Iran's influence continues to grow. In my view, this shows that containment and detente cannot deter a regime driven by a fundamentalist ideology. Iran's leaders invoke religious beliefs to justify their violent struggle, their regional dominance, and their commitment to destroying Israel.
“Allah willing, in 25 years there will be no Zionist regime,” Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in 2015, calling the fight to destroy Israel a matter of “jihadist morale.”
I believe that diplomacy, negotiation, and legal and economic punishment are the preferred solutions to most world conflicts. But modern history shows that these tools are ineffective in forcing policy changes on undemocratic fundamentalist regimes that ignore the rules of international relations. Think of Nazi Germany, North Korea, and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
How to deal with proxies poorly
My research on terrorist groups suggests the U.S. is also making mistakes in its response to Iranian proxies: Instead of addressing them collectively as part of a hostile network, the U.S. is treating each proxy as an isolated actor operating in a specific location and trying to contain or mitigate its specific threat.
In Yemen, for example, the US did not prevent Iranian-backed Houthi rebels from seizing territory and effectively replacing the government. The Biden administration even pressured US ally Saudi Arabia in 2021 to stop militarily supporting the country's legitimate leaders in their bloody battle to retain power. Since the start of the Gaza war, the Houthis, following Iran's orders, have begun firing dozens of missiles at Western-flagged ships in the Red Sea.
The United States finally confronted the Houthis in early 2024, launching retaliatory military strikes on Houthi bases in Yemen.
In Iraq, the United States has long ignored Iranian support for Iraqi Shiite militias fighting the Islamic State, as long as these groups remain involved in the war against the Islamic State. Ignoring the long-term impact of their expansion has come at a cost: Over the past year, Iraqi militias have attacked numerous U.S. military bases in the region.
And in Syria, the United States has gradually reduced its support for anti-Assad rebels and pro-democracy Kurdish forces, despite Iran's growing influence in the wake of the Syrian civil war.
The collapse of American deterrence
These foreign policy failures have resulted in the collapse of American deterrence in the Middle East. Simply put, the United States can no longer project sufficient power there to deter Iranian hostile acts.
In April 2024, after Israel killed a senior Iranian official at the Iranian embassy compound in Syria, Iran launched its largest missile attack in history, firing more than 300 missiles at Israel. This was Iran's first direct attack on Israel, but it has faced only minor repercussions, mainly economic sanctions and diplomatic protests.
The United States, which rallied Israel's allies across the Middle East to shoot down the vast majority of Iran's missiles, has once again chosen to prevent a meaningful counterattack. The Biden administration has declared the fact that so few missiles hit Israel a “victory” and has insisted that the United States will not join in any Israeli retaliation against Iran.
America's strong aversion to escalating tensions became even more apparent after top Hezbollah and Hamas leaders were targeted and killed. In late July 2024, Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukr was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut, Lebanon, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in a bombing at a government guesthouse in Iran.
Iran blamed Israel for Haniyeh's killing — a claim shared by US officials, The New York Times reported on condition of anonymity — and vowed to retaliate swiftly.
The United States has been pressuring Israel for months to adopt more precise military tactics to avoid further civilian casualties in the Gaza war, which has killed nearly 40,000 people in its first six months.
But when Israel finally did just that, eliminating specific terrorists who were killing Israelis and Americans, U.S. policymakers worried that such cross-border attacks would lead to increased regional tensions.
If the United States wants to achieve long-term peace in the Middle East, it must first acknowledge the failures of the past decade. The evidence supports my conclusion that Iran is not an enemy that can simply be deterred, contained, or de-escalated.
Allie Pelliger is director of security studies and professor of criminology and justice studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
