#deterrence

By ZVIKA KLEIN

Our intelligence and air force officers played their hand with surgical care. Once the missiles stopped flying, Tehran ordered a blackout so severe that NetBlocks data registered connectivity plunging into single digits. That level of throttling isn’t about “cybersecurity” but rather about muzzling any glimpse of the strike footage, any grainy upload of damage that might embolden Iranians to question the narrative they’ve been fed for decades.

Who knows? Maybe Israel is to blame for this disconnect. We will likely only know in a few decades when this operation becomes a standard playbook in militaries worldwide.

Even as bombs and bytes struck in tandem, Israel’s messaging made a point of distinguishing between fighting the regime and targeting ordinary citizens. There’s a world of difference between saying, “We must overthrow the government because it threatens us,” and “We are at war with those who fund and command these attacks at your expense.” The IDF wanted to keep the focus squarely on the IRGC’s infrastructure, not on the people caught in the crossfire.

And make no mistake: Despite the pundits who dismiss us as a one-trick pony, this mission bore all the hallmarks of the Israeli way: ingenuity under pressure, rapid improvisation, and a stubborn faith that we could pull it off.

Literally years of planning laid the groundwork: By last November, military intelligence and Mossad analysts were already running simulations on how to collapse key enrichment cascades at Natanz and Fordow with minimal collateral damage. In parallel, Mossad operatives smuggled suitcase drones into Iran’s border provinces, ready to blind radar arrays ahead of the opening salvo.

When those jets finally roared in at dawn, they weren’t just following flight plans; they were executing a doctrine built on flexibility of mind. We briefed our best scientists and engineers on zero-margin blast effects, we rehearsed communications blackouts, and we vetted every bombing coordinate against civilian footprints gathered from high-resolution imagery. That’s why, even though we struck dozens of sites, Iranian street cameras showed almost no evidence of mass casualties.

ON THE diplomatic front, too, we leaned in. While US President Donald Trump publicly dangled the threat of American strikes should Tehran continue its nuclear advances, behind closed doors, he granted us the green light to proceed, so long as we kept the death toll low and the operation limited in scope. It’s not often that you see a US president and an Israeli prime minister coordinating multi-domain operations with that level of trust.

Yet, for all our precision, Israel knew the risks. The regime’s next move was predictably brutal: volleys of ballistic missiles armed with modified cluster-munition warheads. One of these rockets showered Holon and Azor with submunitions designed to tear through apartment windows and cars – an escalation we hadn’t seen before in the same conflict. Cluster bomblets crashed on Israeli soil, littering the ground with lethal scrap for weeks and turning everyday streets into minefields.

And still, Iran persisted. Their cyberwarriors struck back, hijacking broadcast feeds to show images of their own “martyrs” and warning Iranians that our “terrorist” campaign would only intensify. The regime’s playbook is simple: heighten fear to crush dissent, then point the finger at “external enemies” to rally a battered population.

So what have we learned?

First, true deterrence demands multi-domain integration: air power alone won’t cut it, nor will cyber raids executed in isolation. The IDF found itself orchestrating espionage, sabotage, strikes, and propaganda in perfect synchrony.

Second, the regime’s vulnerabilities go far beyond centrifuges and missile silos; they lie in their own brittle information environment. Cutting off their headlines and their HOD IMs can sometimes hurt as much as a cruise missile.

“This is not an all-out war but a decentralized one with seemingly unconnected fronts that span across continents. It is fought in a hybrid style, meaning both with tanks and planes and with disinformation campaigns, political interference, and cyberwarfare. The strategy blurs the lines between war and peace and combatants and civilians. It puts a lot of extra fog in the "fog of war."

China, Russia, and Iran disagree on many things, but they all have the same goal: ridding their regions of U.S. influence and creating a multipolar global governance system and Tehran, Beijing, and Moscow know that U.S. political and military might is the only force preventing them from imposing their will on their neighbors.

(…)

When it comes to this war, the United States is asleep at the wheel. U.S. strategy has been about preparation for a large conventional war, containment, and weak deterrence. Washington has been pitifully absent in the irregular warfare field. There are almost no punishments or accountability—besides ineffective sanctions—for the nations that attack us.

(…)

Should the Biden administration continue its ineffective course, these countries will only be emboldened. Should support for Israel or Ukraine fail, China will be more likely to invade Taiwan. Deterrence is a great strategy but only works when the other side believes you will carry out your threats. You must establish that understanding by holding your enemies accountable for moves they take against you.

(…)

The Biden administration's support for Ukraine has been a rare show of force that has sent a strong message to the world. But it isn't enough. The U.S. foreign policy establishment must recognize the hybrid war being waged against it and show up on the irregular field of battle. Like it or not, the United States is the guarantor of stability in the world. By retreating from its responsibilities, the only thing Washington is guaranteeing is dark times ahead.”

“The list encompasses not just the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, but hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh, Serbian military measures against Kosovo, fighting in Eastern Congo, complete turmoil in Sudan since April, and a fragile cease-fire in Tigray that Ethiopia seems poised to break at any time. Syria and Yemen have not exactly been quiet during this period, and gangs and cartels continuously menace governments, including those in Haiti and Mexico. All of this comes on top of the prospect of a major war breaking out in East Asia, such as by China invading the island of Taiwan.

The Uppsala Conflict Data Program, which has been tracking wars globally since 1945, identified 2022 and 2023 as the most conflictual years in the world since the end of the Cold War. Back in January 2023, before many of the above conflicts erupted, United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed sounded the alarm, noting that peace “is now under grave threat” across the globe. The seeming cascade of conflict gives rise to one obvious question: Why?

(…)

The first explanation holds that the cascade is in the eye of the beholder. People are too easily “fooled by randomness,” the essayist and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb admonished in his 2001 book of the same title, seeking intentional explanations for what may be coincidence. The flurry of armed confrontations could be just such a phenomenon, concealing no deeper meaning: Some of the frozen conflicts, for instance, were due for flare-ups or had gone quiet only recently. Today’s volume of wars, in other words, should be viewed as little more than a series of unfortunate events that could recur or worsen at any time.

(…)

Although coincidences certainly do occur, the current onslaught happens to be taking place at a time of big changes in the international system. The era of Pax Americana appears to be over, and the United States is no longer poised to police the world. Not that Pax Americana was necessarily so peaceful. The 1990s were especially disputatious; civil wars arose on multiple continents, as did major wars in Europe and Africa. But the United States attempted to solve and contain many potential conflicts: Washington led a coalition to oust Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from Kuwait, facilitated the Oslo Process to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, fostered improved relations between North and South Korea, and encouraged the growth of peacekeeping operations around the globe. Even following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the invasion of Afghanistan was supported by many in the international community as necessary to remove a pariah regime and enable a long-troubled nation to rebuild. War was not over, but humanity seemed closer than ever to finding a formula for lasting peace.

Over the subsequent decades, the United States seemed to fritter away both the goodwill needed to support such efforts and the means to carry them out. By the early 2010s, the United States was bogged down in two losing wars and recovering from a financial crisis. The world, too, had changed, with power ebbing from Washington’s singular pole to multiple emerging powers. As then–Secretary of State John Kerry remarked in a 2013 interview in The Atlantic, “We live in a world more like the 18th and 19th centuries.” And a multipolar world, where several great powers jostle for advantage on the global stage, harbors the potential for more conflicts, large and small.

Specifically, China has emerged as a great power seeking to influence the international system, whether by leveraging the economic allure of its Belt and Road Initiative or by militarily revising the status quo within its region. Russia does not have China’s economic muscle, but it, too, seeks to dominate its region, establish itself as an influential global player, and revise the international order. Whether Russia or China is yet on an economic or military par with the United States hardly matters. Both are strong enough to challenge the U.S.-led international order by leveraging the revisionist sentiment they share with countries throughout the global South.

(…)

Suppose, though, that the proliferation of wars doesn’t have a systemic cause, but an entirely particular one. That the world owes its present state of unrest directly to Russia—and, even more specifically, to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 and its decision to continue fighting since.

The war in Ukraine, the largest war in Europe since World War II and one poised to continue well past 2024, is absorbing the attention of international actors who otherwise would have been well positioned to prevent any of the abovementioned crises from escalating. This case is not the same as the great-power distraction, in which the world’s most powerful states simply fail to focus on emerging crises. Rather, the great powers lack the diplomatic and military capacity to respond to conflicts beyond Ukraine—and other actors know it.

(…)

These three explanations—coincidence, multipolarity, Russia’s war in Ukraine—are not mutually exclusive. If anything, they are interrelated, as wars are complex events; the decline of U.S. hegemony contributes to growing multipolarity; and great-power competition has surely fed Russia’s aggression and the West’s response. The consequence is that others are caught in the great-power cross fire or will seek to start fires of their own. Even if none of these wars rise to the level of a third world war, they will be devastating all the same. We do not need to be in a world war to be in a world at war.

France not being able to underwrite any of their defense commitments. While the Little Entente continued to exist on paper, France was the big deterrent factor in ensuring that Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia would be secure in their own territories and not falling prey to revanchist power aims.

Thanks for the question, Cle-Guy.