America’s allies believe the Biden administration’s credibility is deteriorating on the world stage and it has lost control of escalation management in conflict zones, namely the Middle East and Ukraine. This Washington Examiner series, Lost Authority, will look at the reasons why. Click here to read Part 1.
Iran’s campaign against the West, and in particular the United States, is in full force less than three months out from the election and 10 months after Hamas’s attack in Israel.
It is trying to interfere in the U.S. 2024 presidential election, attempting to hack former President Donald Trump’s campaign, and Tehran has directed its proxy forces in the Middle East to attack U.S. and Israeli interests in the region over the last 10 months, with the threat of further reprisals looming.
Iran’s maligned activities against the U.S. far extend beyond the Middle East and militarized conflicts, even as reports indicate it is continuing the pursuit of a nuclear weapon.
Election interference and division attempts
Tehran is seeking to sow discord in the U.S. ahead of the election to divide the country. Several groups with ties to Iran have ramped up their online influence campaigns targeting Americans ahead of November’s election, according to a report from Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center from earlier this month.
One Iranian group identified in the report, Storm-2035, set up four fake partisan news websites posing as legitimate and designed to stoke partisan divisions. One site the group set up, called Nio Thinker, is designed to look like a progressive news site, and it insulted Trump, calling him an “opioid-pilled elephant in the MAGA china shop” and a “raving mad litigiosaur.”
“Iran seeks to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions. Iran has furthermore demonstrated a longstanding interest in exploiting societal tensions through various means, including through the use of cyber operations to attempt to gain access to sensitive information related to U.S. elections,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a statement last week.
The intelligence community has indicated Tehran does not want to see another Trump term due to its perception that it would increase tensions between the two countries.
Iran is getting “increasingly aggressive” in this election cycle, despite its efforts to influence previous U.S. elections, “specifically involving influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations targeting presidential campaigns.”
The intelligence community has attributed an attempted hacking of the Trump campaign to Iran, the agencies said in their statement, adding that they are “confident that the Iranians have through social engineering and other efforts sought access to individuals with direct access to the presidential campaigns of both political parties.”
US ALLIES LOSING RESPECT FOR BIDEN’S APPROACH TO ESCALATION MANAGEMENT
Nuclear threat
Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged last month that Iran is much closer to getting a nuclear weapon now than in the past.
It is “probably one or two weeks away” from producing enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon, he said last month, though it hasn’t “produced a weapon itself, but that’s something, of course, that we track very, very carefully.”
Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) said last week that Iran could declare itself to be a nuclear power by the end of the year, blaming the Biden administration.
“There is a possibility, with the advances that have been made under the Biden administration’s policy, that Iran could — reports are out that Iran could declare itself a nuclear weapon state by the end of the year,” Turner said on CBS News’s Face the Nation, adding that the “flexibility and freedom that they’ve had under the Biden administration has given them the ability to both try to influence our elections, actively try to undertake a plot to assessing Donald Trump, and to continue their nuclear weapons and their nuclear enrichment programs.”
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, described Tehran to the Washington Examiner last month as “emboldened” and said, “If Iran gets its enrichment toward nuclear grade enrichment capabilities, if they purchase a nuclear warhead from Russia, China, or North Korea, it’s important — we’d have to deal with the head of the snake. I hope that day never happens, but a nuclear Iran is not going to be acceptable.”
Michael Rubin, a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, told the Washington Examiner that the U.S.’s “consistent policy” over the last 25 years or so is to “kick the can down the road on Iran’s nuclear program. Unfortunately, roads eventually end, and so the policy of procrastination no longer can work.”
Trump assassination plot, Soleimani fallout
A major moment in the Trump administration was when the U.S. military carried out the assassination of senior Iranian military leader Gen. Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. The strike, which took place in Iraq, was believed at the time could lead to a more significant conflict, but it didn’t after Tehran’s military response.
Iranian leaders vowed to avenge Soleimani’s killing and remain committed to doing so against Trump and any of his administration officials involved in the strike. This threat has been known for several years, and many senior leaders involved still have security protection, though lower-level officials do not. It recently reentered the spotlight after a Pakistani man was arrested after allegedly trying to arrange an assassination plot against Trump.
Asif Raza Merchant, 46, who is accused of trying to arrange a murder-for-hire scheme, was arrested on July 12.
“For years, the Justice Department has been working aggressively to counter Iran’s brazen and unrelenting efforts to retaliate against American public officials for the killing of Iranian General Soleimani,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said. “The Justice Department will spare no resource to disrupt and hold accountable those who would seek to carry out Iran’s lethal plotting against American citizens and will not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to target American public officials and endanger America’s national security.”
The plot was unrelated to Thomas Matthew Crooks’s assassination attempt against Trump last month.
Another man with Iranian ties was arrested in 2022 after allegedly trying to arrange a plot to murder John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser at the time of the strike.
Bolton, who still has Secret Service protection, previously told the Washington Examiner that the Biden administration has “basically” let Iran “escape the consequences,” adding, “I think there are things that [the administration] could do inside Iran to make it clear that we’re not going to wait for an attack to succeed — that this is unacceptable behavior and that we’re not going to tolerate it.”
Middle East tension and Iran’s proxies
As Iran attempts to sow discord in the U.S., the military conflict in the Middle East threatens to escalate.
The U.S. has sought to convince Iran not to retaliate against Israel for the assassination last month of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Haniyeh’s assassination took place on July 31, while he was in Tehran for the inauguration of President Masoud Pezeshkian, and Iranian leaders quickly vowed they would avenge the presumed Israeli attack.
“The Iranians have never doubted our capabilities. They are good. They are good at looking at correlation of forces. … They know what we can do to them. They know what Israel can do to them. What they doubt is our will,” retired Gen. Frank McKenzie said on the School of War podcast last week. “You can have the greatest capability in the world, but if they think that you’re not going to use it, then the capability is irrelevant.”
Hezbollah had also threatened to carry out an attack on Israel in response to an airstrike that killed a commander, Fuad Shukr, who the Israelis said was responsible for an attack that killed about a dozen teenagers in the Golan Heights last month. Hezbollah seemingly was preparing to carry out that attack last weekend when the Israeli military carried out what it called “preemptive” strikes, though Hezbollah then fired more than 200 projectiles from Lebanon toward Israel early Sunday.
The U.S. military was not involved in Israel’s strikes but did help it with intelligence surveillance reconnaissance support for tracking the incoming missiles and drones, according to Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, Pentagon spokesman. The U.S. did not intercept any of the Hezbollah-fired projectiles.
Iran has spent decades supporting and aiding militaries and terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East, providing it with an ability to attack the U.S. and Israel without doing so directly.
“Iran is still fueling an array of conflicts in the region, many of them have their own logics, and I think Iran is not necessarily starting with fires but definitely adding fuel to the flames,” Daniel Byman, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Examiner. “But Iranian weapons, Iranian money, Iranian training, Iranian punishment, all this matters. So I think the Biden administration has made positive contributions, but that’s far from complete success.”
Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon, is considered Iran’s most sophisticated proxy force, and it has been engaged in a limited war against Israel since shortly after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel.
Hamas is another Iranian-supported terrorist group, but its ranks have been decimated during the war, which has destroyed much of the Gaza Strip. The Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry has reported that more than 40,000 people have been killed since the war began, though that total doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants. Israeli officials have said that roughly 17,000 militants have been killed.
Hamas’s strategy includes embedding itself and using civilian infrastructure to operate among civilians. Hamas also has spent many years building an expansive tunnel system underneath Gaza where it can move around and store weapons.
“I don’t know that there’s been a more complex operational environment than Gaza in the history of warfare, especially modern warfare, where so much of the fight is subterranean and you’re trying to affect those subterranean networks from the air or from the ground,” Christopher Maier, assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict, said during a Defense Writers Group event last week.
Israel has continued its war objectives in Gaza despite increasing global isolation due to the death toll and humanitarian crises. Biden’s administration has largely supported Israel’s war against Hamas but has repeatedly urged them publicly and privately to do more to prevent civilian casualties. Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now the Democratic presidential nominee, has shared largely similar positions on the war as Biden but has more frequently spoken about the plight of Palestinian civilians.
Netanyahu, who has at times verbally tussled with the U.S. since the Oct. 7 attack in the face of such criticism, “is making a series of political bets” that a second Trump administration would be more supportive of its war efforts, Byman explained.
The Israeli prime minister stopped by Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump last month during his trip to the U.S. in which he addressed Congress. He also met with Biden and Harris.
“Harris, in her policy statement so far, and she seems to be, you know, expressing somewhat greater sympathy for the position of ordinary Palestinians in Gaza,” he added. “But it doesn’t look like she’s signaling a significant shift from the Biden administration’s policies. … So I don’t think it’s likely to be a significant change from what Biden has been doing.”
The U.S. is working with Qatar and Egypt to act as mediators between Israel and Hamas as they try to broker a ceasefire agreement that ends the war in exchange for the release of hostages and allows for desperately needed aid to get to Gaza and for it to get distributed through the strip without fear of being caught in the crossfire. Officials are in Cairo this week trying to further the proposal and get the remaining obstacles worked out.
Another Iranian proxy, the Houthis in Yemen, has primarily attacked commercial vessels transiting the waterways off Yemen’s coasts, but the Houthis have also fired hundreds of projectiles, missiles, and drones at Israel since Oct. 7. Their attacks have affected the global shipping industry as companies have been forced to have their vessels take longer journeys to avoid the Gulf of Aden, the Bab al Mandab Strait, and the Suez Canal by going all the way around the African continent.
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Iran also supports various militias in Iraq and Syria that have, since last fall in the aftermath of Hamas’s attack, fired rockets, drones, and missiles at U.S. bases in those countries and in Jordan. Dozens of U.S. troops have been injured, and three were killed at Tower 22 in Jordan in late January. The U.S. military carried out airstrikes against the militias, which have largely stopped the attacks on U.S. forces, though some have been carried out in recent weeks.
“At some point, we have to deal with the source, and that’s Iran,” McCaul said.