John Allen Gay
Iran cannot deter Israel. Israel’s military and covert capabilities have had free rein to take on the Islamic Republic and its partners. Iran’s deterrence failure has brought the regime to an uncomfortable choice: risk everything to dash for nuclear weapons, or place itself at the mercy of Jerusalem and Washington. How did things get here?
Before April of last year, Iranian deterrence looked solid enough. Tehran had a four-legged stool of answers to Israeli and American threats.
The first leg was the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force’s (AF) arsenal of thousands of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones, ready to strike around the region. They’d used this tool to retaliate against the U.S. assassination of IRGC Quds Force (QF) commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020, hammer ISIS targets in Syria, and conduct many lower-profile strikes on Kurdish separatists and alleged Israeli safehouses in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The second leg was Iran’s network of proxy groups. The IRGC-QF had strong relations with a robust array of militant groups across the greater Middle East, stretching from recruiting pools among the marginalized Shia populations of Afghanistan and Pakistan, to militiamen in Iraq and Syria, to the Houthis of Yemen. The crown jewel of this network was Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group that boasted some 150,000 missiles, rockets, and drones able to strike across the length of the land of Israel.
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