NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {O} n Monday, the official Iranian radio network Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran announced that “the victory of God is near.” If that reads a bit like a threat, that was likely the intention behind it. And it seems like America and the West are taking it seriously.

In response to Hamas’s slaughter of over 1,300 innocents in Israel, the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group was moved to the eastern Mediterranean off the coast of the Levant. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower carrier strike group soon joined the Ford. The amphibious assault ship USS Bataan was dispatched to the region this week, and 2,000 U.S. Marines have been given notice to prepare for a potential deployment to Israel for non-combat missions.

This deterrent posture coincides with President Joe Biden’s visit to the Middle East tomorrow, where he will meet with Israeli political officials as well as King Abdullah of Jordan, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. The backdrop against which these meetings will occur isn’t just the war Israel has declared against Hamas but the threat of a “larger regional conflict.” The locus of that threat is in Iran, and the question looms large: Will Iran use an anticipated ground invasion of Hamas as cover to inaugurate a larger war against Israel and its chief ally, the United States?

According to numerous news reports from the region, Israel delayed a ground assault of Gaza over the weekend due to uncooperative weather that would have reduced the efficacy of Israeli air cover. But there are other considerations staying Israel’s hand, too: the influx of Western officials into the country, the perception that the Israel Defense Forces must make all due preparations for an operation unlike anything the IDF has seen in decades, and the threat posed by the Lebanon-based Iranian proxy militia Hezbollah. The Jerusalem Post reported on Monday night that there is “a growing concern that Hezbollah is waiting for the moment that most IDF ground forces are committed to Gaza to open a full front with the IDF in the north,” adding that the terror group is engaged in an “elaborate fake-out to lure the IDF into a false sense of security, similar to what Hamas pulled off in the south.”

The question that Israel and the United States appear to be wrestling with is whether Iran can be deterred from broadening the scope of this war, as it clearly hopes to.

“Our numerous intelligence reports show that the US is formulating the Zionist regime’s current policy, and what is being done is governed by US policymaking,” read an English-language post on social media attributed to Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei. “The US must be held responsible for this situation.” The Iranian regime and its proxies do not regard Israel’s actions and America’s as distinct, and they would likely prosecute an open conflict against Israel as they would one against the West more broadly. Toward that end, as Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, related, Iranian television is running ads seeking “volunteers from Iran to join the fight,” leaning on Hezbollah to out U.S. intelligence assets in Lebanon, and tasking the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps with efforts to “mobilize militias in Iraq.” These are all parts of “attempts to spark a wider war,” he writes.

The threat of that wider war is real, but the shooting hasn’t started yet. So, can Iran be deterred?

In the broadest sense, the answer is no. Hamas’s primary foreign sponsor is the Islamic Republic. Even though the United States has not yet established that Iran played an operational role in Hamas’s terrorist slaughter of women, children, and seniors on Israeli streets — not to the degree the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have, at least — Biden administration officials do not doubt that Iran is at least “complicit” in the attack. If Hamas’s actions represent the unbridled expression of the Iranian regime’s highest aspirations, they underscore the absolute imperative of denying the Iranian regime the ability to develop a fissionable device. If there were any doubts that Iran would facilitate the deniable use of a weapon of mass death against Jews come what may, the events of October 7 should eliminate them for good.

In a more practical sense, Iran has shown that it can be contained, but restoring the conditions in which prudence might prevail will not be a pain-free exercise.

The first step toward a policy that would contain Iran involves doing away with the fantasy that the Islamic Republic can be appeased. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have demonstrated an increasing disapproval of the Biden administration’s efforts to ingratiate itself with the regime in Tehran. This week, in an open letter to the White House, 110 lawmakers, including 60 House Democrats, called on the president to reimpose economic sanctions lifted amid the administration’s blinkered pursuit of something resembling the Obama administration’s failed nuclear deal. The White House should heed this request and augment it with additional permanent freezes on Iranian overseas assets.

Unfortunately, economic pressure is not enough to dissuade the mullahs. The Biden administration should therefore reserve the right to restore deterrence — if it breaks down in the form of a Hezbollah attack on Isarel — as the Trump administration did.

In remarks with broad implications, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared in 2019 that the U.S. needed to “restore deterrence” in the region. The observation was prompted by a series of attacks on civilian oil tankers by Iranian forces in the Persian Gulf. But deterrence was not restored, and Iran continued to test the U.S.’s limits. By the end of 2019, Iran-backed militias were responsible for a variety of attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq (some of which produced American fatalities) and a brazen, multi-drone strike on the world’s largest petroleum-processing facility in Saudi Arabia. Something had to be done, and that something took the form of the strike that neutralized IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani.

Iran retaliated for the attack, but it did so in ways the Pentagon deemed “defensive and proportional.” Nothing beyond that followed, perhaps due as much to the loss of Soleimani and his influence over Iranian capabilities in the region as to the effectiveness of the message the Trump White House communicated to Iran. The Biden administration would be wise to convey in no uncertain terms the fate that awaits Iranian assets if they intervene — either directly or by proxy — in Israel’s war. The administration is obliged to state plainly that the party to this conflict that needs to be “restrained” is Iran’s terrorist militias, which are champing at the bit to kill more Israelis. Absent that restraint, Iran will trigger a direct and disproportionate response from the United States.

There’s still time to prevent a regional conflagration, but the signals Biden sends must be crystal clear: Iran will lose much more than it will gain in such a war.