Never Listen to Iran Hawks

No one should ever make threats that would be stupid and self-defeating to back up.

Hal Brands tries to sell escalation with Iran as deterrence:

First, the US needs to reinforce Iran’s disincentives to escalate by escaping a damaging pattern. Typically, when Iranian proxies strike US forces, Washington responds proportionally against the forces in question. But this cedes the initiative to the enemy, and allows Iran to shield itself from retribution for its proxies’ attacks. America must make clear, through the available channels, that attacks on US forces will be met with disproportionate responses against the Iranian military itself. Escalation dominance is only valuable if America is willing to use it.

No one should ever make threats that would be stupid and self-defeating to back up. If the U.S. sends Iran a message that it will strike directly at Iranian forces in response to attacks by proxies, it would have to follow through on that threat in the event that the militia attacks continue. If preventing regional escalation is supposed to be the goal, as Brands claims to believe, threatening to escalate the conflict is just about the stupidest thing one can do.

Carrying out that threat would mean committing acts of war against Iranian forces, and that would likely trigger a larger and much costlier conflict. That’s exactly what the U.S. shouldn’t do.