Last week, the Department of Justice announced that it had filed charges against several individuals, including a Pakistani national, for plotting to assassinate former President Donald Trump on American soil on behalf of the Iranian government. Avid followers of current affairs could be forgiven for missing this story.
The Department of Justice made no effort to play up this success in foiling an assassination attempt against the former president, not even to try to erase the stain of having nearly allowed Donald Trump to be killed last month in Butler, Pennsylvania. This was ironic given the arrests took place the very day before Trump was shot.
There was no Oval Office address from President Biden, solemnly declaring this an act of aggression against the entire United States and pledging retribution. Kamala Harris reportedly left a National Security Council meeting called to discuss rising tensions between Israel, Iran, and Lebanon early, without making any comment or even acknowledging the arrests.
The media appear to have taken their lead from the Biden-Harris administration. The story that a foreign government was actively orchestrating the assassination of a former U.S. president and candidate for that office in November apparently was barely newsworthy.
It is easy to ascribe this shocking indifference to partisanship, and it would be correct to do so. With Joe Biden out of the race, it is now all hands on deck for Kamala, and woe to any corporate media employee who suggests coverage that might aid Donald Trump’s campaign. However, there are deeper implications here.
That Iran undertook efforts to assassinate former President Trump on American soil confirms that American deterrence has collapsed, and Tehran no longer fears U.S. retaliation.
Under the Biden-Harris administration, the United States has fallen victim to a policy of proportionality in which the United States responds to attacks on American targets – whether former presidents on American soil or U.S. service members, three of whom were killed in Jordan in January – by hitting back at the proxies who carried them out. Iran has figured out that if the Houthis fire missiles at U.S. ships, the U.S. will only strike back ineffectively at the Houthis. If Hamas attacks Israel, the U.S. will restrict Israel from hitting Hamas. If Hezbollah attacks, Israel will target Hezbollah.
Iran is thereby able to use proxies not only as expendable human shields for its operations but also to control the targets of American and Israeli retaliation. If Iran wants to provoke a conflict in Lebanon, it will have Hezbollah fire missiles into northern Israel, knowing that the Biden-Harris administration will push Israel to retaliate against Lebanon instead of Iran. If Iran wishes to destabilize the U.S. relationship with Iraq, it can have Shia militias in that country hit U.S. military bases there or in Jordan, resulting in U.S. retaliatory strikes in Iraq.
In sum, Iran is not only choosing which targets it attacks. Under the Biden-Harris administration, Iran also gets to control American target selection, and to the extent Israel bows to American pressure, Israel’s target selection as well.
This dynamic gives Iran full control over escalation in the Middle East. It can, at its convenience, quiet certain fronts when its proxies are losing – as it has on several occasions by offering cease-fires in Gaza or Iraq – while escalating in other areas such as Yemen. By contrast, the U.S. has failed to shut down a single “front” by fully defeating any Iranian proxy, whether in Iraq, Syria, or Yemen, and it will not allow Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza, much less go after Hezbollah.
The United States under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is checkmated. Iran knows it, so they don’t fear the Biden-Harris team. The Biden-Harris team knows it, which is why they have ignored all Iranian attacks on our troops in favor of pretending Iran does not exist. Israel knows it too, which is why they have bypassed Gaza and begun asymmetrically escalating to hit Iranian targets within Iran itself.
This brings us back to why Iran hates Donald Trump so much. President Trump managed to paralyze this Iranian strategy by killing Soleimani. The killing was justified, but, critically, it was not a proportional response to any specific Iranian action.
Rather, it was a target of opportunity. Iran did not calculate it occurring when they sent Soleimani to Iraq, forcing them to recalculate all their future operations. The Iranians are malicious actors, but ultimately highly rational. When their predictive system broke down, they paused their terror campaign and went back to the drawing board. They did not hit back particularly hard.
That lesson was not lost on Israel, which has also begun hitting targets in Iran, and it is worth noting that despite big talk, Iran still has not retaliated against Israel for sending a missile into the room of Hamas’s leader within Iran’s presidential complex.
Rather than learning from Donald Trump’s successes, the Harris-Biden team has instead tried to respond proportionally and predictably to every Iranian action. In the process, they have lost all deterrence. The Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen have been hitting shipping for almost half a year, and Operation Prosperity Guardian has only succeeded in spending millions deflecting missiles that cost the Houthis $10,000.
People will say the Biden-Harris Department of Justice is also playing down the Trump assassination plot because they want a new Iran deal. At the very least, they do not want to do anything that implies Trump’s policy was successful or that he was respected enough by our enemies for them to want to kill him, as their line is that he was a figure of mockery. Admitting Trump’s policy was successful enough to justify Iranian efforts to kill him would undermine this line. Achieving a nuclear deal would prove that the alternative was better.
Harris seems committed to this approach. Phil Gordon, her likely national security adviser should she win the White House this November, is closely associated with the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which is seen as a lobbying network for the regime, and in 2020 “claimed continued sanctions on Iran would create a catastrophe in the Middle East.” According to the Washington Free Beacon, in 2014 Gordon told the NIAC that a “nuclear agreement [with Iran] could begin a multi-generational process that could lead to a new relationship between our countries.”
The best that can be said about Gordon is that he is naïve. A deal is off the table when the Iranians have no reason to make concessions for things they can already get for free. The real problem is that the Iranians have won and checkmated the Biden-Harris team.
As long as Iran, not the U.S., controls escalation, as it does under Biden and Harris, the U.S. cannot control the response. Without being able to control the response, the United States cannot respond. Without being able to respond, the best option for the Biden-Harris team is to bury their heads in the sand and pretend Iranian provocations are not happening, as they did with the attacks on U.S. troops last week. That is better than admitting they cannot do anything about it.
The administration and media are not burying the most recent Trump assassination plot merely because it might make Trump look good. They are doing so because focusing too closely on it might reveal how badly they have lost to Iran, as well as the impotence of the United States under their leadership to do anything when a foreign government tries to carry out assassinations on American soil.
As with the weakening economy, the plan is not to address America’s problems or provide any sort of policy platform, but to try and run out the clock. Ignoring an inconvenient attempt by Iran to murder Donald Trump is just the latest example of this.
Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.
