"The Iran war started under Biden, not Trump. Joe said 'don't,' and Tehran did" (The Washington Examiner)
The Iran war started under Biden.... not Trump....when Joe Biden said 'don't,' and Tehran did
Opinion by Burak Oktenli, Washington Examiner
As the costs of the Iran campaign mount and Congress fights over a Bill to cover them, a familiar question circulates in Washington: Did this 2026 War have to happen?
It is the right question..... but aimed at the wrong date....2026 ..it open in 2024!
This conflict opened on the night of April 13, 2024, when Iran fired more than 300 drones and missiles at a U.S. ally Israel after an American warning and paid no price for it.
Recall: Deterrence theory turns on exactly this memory....because Biden was asked by policy wonks for his message to Iran What if.? ....and Biden responded: “Don’t.” ...and Iran did.
By the Israeli military’s count, 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and over 120 ballistic missiles came that night, the first direct Iranian attack on Israel in history.
The interception was a triumph: American, Israeli, and allied systems knocked down about 99% of the barrage.
As a demonstration of capability, it was flawless. ..........But, as a demonstration of will by Biden that followed undercut it. Washington imposed no cost.
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Biden (already soft on our S. Border placing Americans at risk who were murdered by illegal immigrants) said the U.S. would not join a response urging Israel to accept the defense and “take the win.”
But, Biden’s choice, defensible on its terms, aimed at preventing a wider war...but ignored ‘soft deterrence’ is unsentimental about such choices....as former Pres. Ronald Reagan knew.
Prominent 2005 Nobel Prize Am. Economist Thomas Schelling (conflict resolution, and behavioral economics) built the modern theory on one single insight:
A threat deters only when the adversary believes it will be carried out.
Analysts at West Point’s War Institute distilled the corollary years earlier, writing about the Syria red line, that if you end up having to send in ground forces, deterrence has already failed.
A one-word warning paired with a zero-cost aftermath does not read, in Tehran, as restraint. It reads as a price to pay, and the price was zero.
This was not the 1st data point Iranian planners observed. In 2013, Obama’s chemical weapons red line in Syria ....was crossed without the consequence that had been threatened.
For Iran....the April 2024 did not establish the pattern — it confirmed it.
Two administrations Obama and Biden had now signaled, and then declined to enforce.
The lesson the Iranian adversary drew from that is not partisan. It is actuarial: American warnings could be discounted to near zero, and Iran priced its behavior priced accordingly.
In Feb. 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA reported 274.8 kilos of uranium enriched to 60%.....the largest such stockpile ever held by a State without nuclear weapons.
Two months later by May, it was 408.6 kilograms; by June 13, 2025, the eve of the Israeli strikes, 441 kilos. Sixty percent enrichment is but a technical step from weapons-grade, with only 42 kilos further enriched, yields one weapon’s worth of material.....meaning the potential for at least 10 nuclear weapons....by the single largest sponsor of State sponsored Terrorism in the last 47 years.
That stockpile did not grow in defiance of American deterrence. It grew in the space where deterrence was absent.
To be precise about what came next; When Israeli aircraft first struck Iran’s nuclear program in 2025, the U.S. response was not to open with maximum force.
Instead, it was to offer Tehran a final off-ramp, in terms no one could misread: Stop now, before it is too late. Force followed only after that exit was refused.
Whatever one concludes....the sequence matters: Escalation to “death and destruction” was the last step after a warning became credible, not the first.
A threat of deterrence that is believed and one that is not is the difference and it is the whole of the argument.
Tehran refused the exit....then narrowed the world’s view of what it was doing.
In July 2025, Iran suspended cooperation with the IAEA.
By late Feb. 2026, the Agency could no longer account for the current size, composition, or whereabouts of that stockpile, having lost access to the affected enrichment facilities.
Iran from experience ignored Biden’s one-word warning ‘Don’t” ...losing nothing and now held nine bombs’ worth of material at an unknown location, racing an inspection blackout.
That was the inheritance from Biden....made the IAEA’s Feb. 28 arithmetic a metric not to be ignored .....rather than choice.
This record deserves a sentence about cost tolerance:
Deterrence is re-established only when an adversary sees a State (Iran) absorb pain and hold on anyway
Regional Islam Sunni partners UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia sat it out (Iran is Shia Islam where terrorists and suicide bombers are formed )
The point is....resolve shown at no cost teaches an adversary nothing, because anyone will hold a line that costs nothing to hold.
Resolve becomes important when maintaining it hurts, and the State maintains it anyway...as Iran has executing 27,000 of its dissidents who openly defy the regime or refuse to wear the hajib.
For the 1st time in a generation, Tehran observed an American commitment (Trump’s) survive sustained a bad news cycle, and adversaries beyond Iran were watching that same demonstration.
None of this is an argument that war is cheap.
The lesson belongs to both U.S. political parties, because an adversary does not grade on a partisan curve....while Iranian Planners reason in decades as American deterrence is re-set every 4 Years!
So, Tehran has learned to wait out whichever U.S. Administration it disliked. Deterrence is re-established only when an adversary sees a State absorb pain and hold on anyway.
The U.S. ‘cheaper path’ was always available and always will be:
The U.S. must convey: mean our warning the 1st time, and enforce it the first time, and never let a one-word threat become something an adversary can safely ignore.
Ronald Reagan’s Peace through strength is not a slogan so much..... as a savings plan, and Biden’s April 2024 after Iran’s attacks on Israel is what defaulting on it looks like.
The Author: Burak Oktenli is a researcher in autonomous systems governance and deterrence.
He holds an MBA and a Master of Professional Studies in Applied Intelligence from Georgetown University, and
His commentary has appeared in the Washington Examiner, RealClearDefense, RUSI Commentary, The Defense Post, and West Point’s Modern War Institute.
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