Don't Use Force to 'Teach' Iran a Lesson

If this is what being “proactive” looks like, the U.S. would do well to avoid it.

Walter Russell Mead wants the U.S. to Do Something about Iran:

Conventional crisis management won’t solve this problem. American foreign policy must shift out of the managerial, reactive mode and become more proactive. The revisionist powers need to spend less time planning how to discomfit America and more time worrying about what the U.S. has planned for them.

The Middle East offers one option to change the momentum. Iran, racing toward nuclear weapons but not yet in possession of them, is overextended and the weakest of the major revisionist powers. Teaching Iran that supporting the Houthis, Hamas and Hezbollah is poor strategy would do more to stabilize the Middle East than 100 painfully negotiated Security Council resolutions about Gaza. It would also instill some healthy caution into the calculations of Moscow and Beijing.

Mead keeps his specific policy recommendations vague enough that no one can quite pin him down on what he is proposing, but he seems to be saying that the U.S. ought to attack Iran to “teach” them that their support for proxies is unwise. He thinks that attacking Iran would somehow stabilize the region, as if the same proxies that Iran has been arming all this time would sit idly by and watch while this went on. If this is what being “proactive” looks like, the U.S. would do well to avoid it.