This archive report was first published on 6 January 2020.
Published on January 6, 2020, the killing of Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, marks a dramatic turning point in the US-Iran confrontation.
For years, Soleimani had been in Washington’s crosshairs, and successive US presidents could have ordered his assassination. However, they chose not to, likely due to concerns that the costs would outweigh the benefits.
President Donald Trump’s decision to order the strike that killed Soleimani and others, including Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a senior commander of the pro-Iranian Iraqi Shiite militia, suggests a different calculus: that Iran has far more to fear from war than does the US.
The strike was meant as a deterrent to further Iranian attacks, but it is almost certain to have the opposite effect. Iran may fear US retaliation, but it fears projecting that fear even more.
Iran cannot allow what it views as a declaration of war to remain unanswered. It will respond, and now must decide whether its reaction will be direct or through the array of proxies and allied forces Soleimani helped build.
The US presence in Iraq, already shaky after the December 29 strike that killed two dozen pro-Iranian Iraqi militia, now hangs by a thread. The Trump administration may decide to depart pre-emptively rather than be forced to leave on Baghdad’s orders.
The truce in Yemen between Saudi Arabia and Iran-backed Huthi fighters is also in greater jeopardy. Watch for Iran’s announcement of its next steps on the nuclear front, taken in response to Washington’s violation of the 2015 deal.
The US-Iran game has changed. Targeting Soleimani is liable to mark a shift from attrition toward open confrontation. In short, a US president who repeatedly claimed that he does not wish to drag the country into another Middle East war has just brought that war one step closer.
Crisis Group is in the business of policy recommendations aimed at averting conflict. It is also in the business of realism. Some kind of conflict is now all but guaranteed, facilitated by a series of Iranian actions of which Soleimani was a mastermind, but rooted in President Trump’s ill-advised and reckless decision to exit the nuclear deal and embark on a policy of “maximum pressure”.
