In West Asia, the game of deterrence has changed
On April 19, US officials anonymously confirmed that Israel had executed a drone strike near Isfahan, Iran’s response has been to downplay the strikes, which can be characterised as Israel’s response to the Iranian drone/missile attack on Israeli territory on April 13. While
Iran and Israel have now both struck each other, the deterrence balance has effectively shifted in Iran’s favour.
Deterrence, according to economic Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling, can be characterised as preventing an adversary from any undesirable action by imposing a credible fear of consequences. The credibility of the threatened consequences is married to the actual ability to carry it out, should the adversary continue to act in an undesired way. When this ability is doubted, even if the adversary’s action continues, deterrence fails. This failure is in turn associated with the red line that a state had set, for its threatened consequences to be triggered.
Hence, red lines also create commitment traps. In West Asia, the most famous red line in recent memory was the one set by Barack Obama in 2011: That if Syria’s Bashar-al-Assad employed chemical weapons amidst the growing civil war, it would cross the United States’ red line, drawing “enormous consequences”.
The Syrian Arab Army eventually crossed this line with a devastating Sarin gas attack on a rebel-held Damascus suburb, killing 1,400. Looking to avoid a direct war with Syria, the United States failed to execute its threat; “The President blinked”, as David Ignatius of The
Washington Post later said. Across the decade since, it has been hard to set red lines in West Asia. The conflict landscape features a diverse set of armed groups, including those funded and sustained by Iran’s formidable paramilitary, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The large presence of the IRGC in Iran allied with Iraq and Syria, has made it a plump target for Israeli air action, allowing Tel Aviv to avoid direct engagement with Iran. Since Iran itself prefers to keep the IRGC’s extraterritorial activity largely discreet, its own response is indirect. It targets other pressure points, such as proxy-led attacks on the forces of Israel’s main backer — the United States. Israel itself has long conducted direct (on Iranian soil) but covert (with plausible deniability) attacks on Iran, including cyber attacks and assassinations of nuclear scientists. Hence, both Iran and Israel have historically preferred a cat-and-mouse approach with plausible deniability, without setting overt commitment traps.
While the Israeli strike on the IRGC on April
1 was not unprecedented, the damage to the Iranian Consulate in the process compelled Iran to declare it as a red line, especially in the face of recent Israeli rhetoric calling to fight Iran directly. Tehran’s response, in turn, was at a higher rung on the escalation ladder — using drones and missiles for a direct (on Israeli soil) and overt (without plausible deniability) attack on Israel. The minimal damage caused and the impressive effectiveness of the combined air defence aside, the step-up along the escalation ladder was unarguable.
The unprecedented nature of the Iranian strike cannot be overstated, especially for Israel which effectively links deterrence to its survival as a nation. Hence, Iran arguably matched its threatened consequences, breaking from the cat-and-mouse mode of engagement and setting new terms. Naturally then, Israel, which has never suffered a direct attack on its soil by Iran, declared this as a breach of Tel Aviv’s own red line, and a declaration of war. However, while the Israeli strike on April 19 was direct (on Iranian soil), it remained covert, with Tel Aviv refusing to take responsibility, and implying that the United States leaked the information needlessly. In any case, Washington had been asserting since April 13, that it would not support Israel in a direct war with Iran (while imposing fresh sanctions) and coaxing Israel to view the successful air defence as victory in itself. Effectively then, with its hand restrained (and neither Washington nor Arab capitals showing appetite for military entanglements with Iran), Israel refrained from climbing up the escalation ladder with a higher-rung response. It reverted to the old modus operandi of direct but covert attacks within Iran.
At the end of it, Israel’s red lines created a commitment trap, with Tel Aviv eventually seeking escalation control by not claiming the Isfahan strike; National Security Minister Ben Gvir implicitly even termed the Israeli response, “lame”. With Iran having thrown the plausible deniability approach out the window through its large drone/missile strike, it is Israel that is staring at deterrence failure in the long run. Hence, instability in West Asia can only be expected to increase as Israel works to restore deterrence, even as the war in Gaza continues, now having killed almost 34,000.