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.”