No, Iran isn't America's 'greatest adversary'

During a recent interview with 60 Minutes, Vice President Kamala Harris said that Iran is the United States’ greatest adversary. “Iran has American blood on its hands, okay?” she said, adding that Iran also attacked Israel with 200 ballistic missiles.

Iran of course does have American blood on its hands. The Iranian leadership helped kill hundreds of American service members who were sent to a ruinous war in Iraq that sprang from the fever dreams of Harris supporter Dick Cheney. But beyond that morally righteous but strategically irrelevant point, Harris’s argument is absurd.

Iran is a regional power in the Middle East, which itself is a poor, weak region that the United States would do well to stay out of.

As to the threat posed by Iran, let’s begin with the basics. Iran has no missiles that can reach the United States. It has no ability to project conventional military power outside its borders. Its military doctrine is based on defense-in-depth, which involves slowly ceding ground to an aggressor while seizing on opportunities to counterattack. As the last Defense Intelligence Agency report on Iran’s military capabilities put it, “Iran’s ‘way of war’ emphasizes the need to avoid or deter conventional conflict while advancing its security objectives in the region, particularly through propaganda, psychological warfare, and proxy operations.”

This is not the Wehrmacht in 1940. Avoiding or deterring conventional conflict while pursuing security objectives in your region through propaganda, psychological warfare, and proxy operations isn’t the path to dominating the Middle East, much less becoming the greatest threat to the United States.

If you wanted to posit any Middle Eastern power as being the United States’ greatest adversary, you’d have to portray it as a country that could at least dominate its region. From well before the Carter Doctrine, U.S. defense planners have worried that a hegemon in the Middle East would have outsized influence over oil markets and could wreak havoc on the world price for oil.

Iran has no shot at dominating the Middle East because its outdated and under-maintained armor, its towed artillery, and its lack of experience with offensive combined arms preclude it. Were Iran crazy enough to try to invade a neighbor, stand-off air power could destroy the attacking force without much struggle.

These massive conventional military weaknesses — which are not fixable in the policy-relevant future — preclude Iran from trying to dominate the region. And an Iran that cannot dominate its region cannot constitute the biggest threat to the United States.

Iran does, of course, have a vehemently anti-American ideology, and does support an array of proxies across the region that stymie U.S. objectives. In that sense, dotting the region with defenseless U.S. deployments that do not contribute to achievable military objectives, serving only as triggers for war with Iran and facilitators for Israeli strikes into Syria, seems foolhardy.

The closer the United States gets to Iran, the more Iran can hurt Americans. Iraq was a trivial threat to the United States until we invaded it, which made it into a much bigger problem. Bashing a hornet’s nest or dancing around a pit of quicksand pose real dangers, but as in those cases, the best option vis-à-vis Iran is to simply stay away.

The best defense that can be mounted of Vice President Harris in this context is that she seemed to be groping around for an answer with the least political downside and the least offense to the foreign policy Blob, and she probably found it. The problem is that she is wrong on the substance. Should her extemporaneous remark influence her policy, it could push the United States further down the road to ruin in the Middle East.