“The war in Iran has entered a more dangerous and unpredictable phase,” said David Satterfield, former U.S. ambassador and director of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy in the latest episode of “Baker Briefing,” the institute’s podcast that explores timely topics with domestic and foreign policy.
“As now it is in its fourth week,” Satterfield continued. “Strikes are intensifying. Diplomacy appears to be stalled. Although rhetoric is high, the global stakes are significant. Today, the risk of expanding, of escalating this conflict is not hypothetical. It’s an increasingly real possibility, if not likelihood.”
Iran used to operate a military doctrine known as “forward defense strategy,” which meant “strategic patience, absorbing pain,” said Mohammad Tabaar, fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute.
“Initially, there was a sense that Iran had in Tehran … there was a sense that they had enough capabilities to survive a war,” Tabaar explained. “But very quickly, it seems that the confidence has gone up, that they feel they have trapped the United States and they can continue inflicting pain on the U.S. and damaging the global economy. And I think the objective is to break what they call a ‘cycle of ceasefire and war.’ The confidence is partly coming out of the sense of an emerging ‘rally around the flag’ effect.”
Satterfield agreed. “ “If you can dissect what’s happened in these four weeks of combat — what you described as Iran’s new offensive strategy rather than a defensive strategy of a lower threshold for taking the fight outside or taking pain outside their borders — it’s a classic horizontal escalation. People wondered why Iran was striking everyone, including states who had actually been seen as intermediaries for Iran, if not inclined towards Iran: Oman, Qatar, even Turkey has been struck. Azerbaijan. It is the spreading of as much pain to as many parties as possible to get them to place pressure on the one decider here, Donald Trump.”
This episode examines the numerous variables of the rapidly escalating conflict between Iran, the U.S. and Israel — “strategic patience,” increasing confidence of Iran’s leadership, leverage over the Strait of Hormuz as well as regional destabilization and prolonged global economic impact.
Listen to the entire episode here, and view all the topical episodes of “Baker Briefing” here.