Nicole Grajewski and Ankit Panda
Although it was the United States and Israel that instigated attacks on Iran on February 28, leaders in Tehran deserve some of the blame for failing to effectively deter their adversaries. As the now deceased commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, once put it, maintaining deterrence is like riding a bicycle: “You have to keep pedaling all the time, or else the bicycle will fall.” Over the past three years, Iran has started to lose its balance; now it has tipped over.
In recent decades, Tehran developed what it believed was a system of layered deterrence. It invested in conventional forces and air defenses to protect its nuclear program and retaliate against Israel and U.S. bases throughout the region. Through a sprawling network of partners known as the axis of resistance—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Houthi forces in Yemen, and Shiite militias in Iraq—Iran promised to escalate any attack on its homeland into a regional affair. And Iran’s nuclear program would function as the ultimate backstop. Tehran hoped that the mere development of an advanced civil nuclear program—not an actual weapon—would make the country too dangerous for adversaries to ignore, even as the ambiguity of the program would make it hard for adversaries to justify an attack against it. If necessary, Iran’s civilian nuclear program could be quickly repurposed for military use.
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