Three waves over Iran and the doctrine of restraint

In the early hours of 26 October, the Israeli air force struck Iran, twenty-five days after the missile volley that Tehran had fired over Israel on the first night of the month. The operation unfolded in three waves, more than a hundred aircraft, including the stealth fighters that the Israeli air force keeps in reserve for the missions that matter, flying through the night to strike the targets that the planners had spent weeks selecting: the missile production facilities, the drone factories, the air defence batteries, including the Russian-made systems that guarded the most sensitive sites, and the launch positions that had fired the missiles in April and October. The aircraft returned home, the strikes were declared complete by the morning, and the casualties, announced by the Iranian military, were limited: four soldiers killed, a civilian dead, damage described by Tehran as ‘limited’ and ‘repaired’. The oil installations, which the markets had feared, and the nuclear facilities, which the diplomats had feared, were both untouched.

The restraint was the operation’s most significant feature. The hawks in the Israeli government had argued, since the October 1 volley, for a reply that would change the strategic equation, strikes on the oil that funds the Iranian state or on the nuclear programme that Israel has long considered the ultimate threat; the operation that actually flew was aimed instead at the military infrastructure of the missile programme, the air defences that protect it, and the message was calibrated with care. The reply was designed to demonstrate the reach and the capability of the Israeli air force, to re-establish the deterrence that the missile volley had dented, and to do so without crossing the lines that would have produced a wider war. The Americans, whose coordination with Israel on the operation was reported and acknowledged, had pressed for exactly this shape.

The exchange settled into the pattern that the year has established. The two states have now traded direct blows twice, in April and in October, and both times the volleys have been followed by replies, and both times the replies have been followed by a return to the status quo ante, the rhetoric escalated, the actual damage contained. The pattern has a name in the literature of the region, the ‘shadow war’ conducted through proxies and operations, and the year has shown that the shadow war can now be fought directly, with missiles and aircraft, without crossing into the war that neither side claims to want.

The containment has its costs. The missile volley of October 1 reached the centre of Israel, the Israeli reply reached the heart of Iran’s air defence system, and the two countries have demonstrated that they can hurt each other in ways that were unthinkable a year ago; the restraint of this round does not guarantee the restraint of the next, and the escalatory logic, once established, is easier to continue than to reverse. The strategic calculators on both sides will read the operation’s limited damage as a success, and the success will be quoted as the reason to repeat the pattern.

The night’s work was, in the narrow sense, done well: the targets were military, the losses were small, the operation was concluded within hours, and the region returned to the state of managed hostility that has become its normal condition. The wider question, which the operation was designed to defer rather than answer, is how long the pattern of calibrated escalation can hold, when the missiles on both sides grow more numerous and the calculations that produced this round’s restraint are made again, under different pressure, in the months ahead.