The Architecture of Escalation
The pattern is now visible. American strikes on Iranian-backed assets in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. Israeli operations against Iranian military infrastructure. Gulf state cooperation — quiet but real — on intelligence sharing and logistical support. Iranian proxies responding with diminishing effectiveness as their supply chains and command structures get systematically degraded.
What The Hill frames as a worrying expansion is better understood as a strategy working through its phases. The question isn't whether the campaign is growing — it obviously is. The question is whether the growth is controlled and purposeful or chaotic and reactive. Based on the operational picture available, it's the former.
Tehran has been running an imperial project across the Middle East since at least 2003, funding and directing Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and various Iraqi militia networks as instruments of regional influence. This isn't contested analysis — it's documented in U.S. intelligence assessments going back twenty years across multiple administrations of both parties. The Iran nuclear deal's critics always argued that it addressed one component of Iranian regional aggression while legitimizing and enriching the broader project. Events since 2015 have validated that criticism.
Why the Multilateral Question Is the Wrong Question
The hand-wringing in foreign policy circles focuses heavily on whether other nations will join the campaign — as if unilateralism is the primary concern. This frames the strategic problem incorrectly.
American military and diplomatic strategy in the Middle East has been multilateral for three decades. The 1991 Gulf War coalition. The 2001 Afghanistan coalition. The 2003 Iraq invasion, which had coalition participation even if that participation was inadequate. The anti-ISIS campaign. In every case, the multilateral architecture required managing competing interests, slowing operational tempo, and making political concessions to maintain coalition cohesion. The results speak for themselves.
I spent time in 2019 at a defense strategy conference in London where analysts from across the Atlantic alliance were debating Iranian escalation scenarios. The consensus among European participants was that Iran should be contained through diplomacy and economic incentives. The consensus among Gulf state participants, speaking carefully off the record, was that Iran was an existential threat that required direct military pressure and that Europe didn't understand the problem because it didn't share the geography. The Gulf states were right then. The current operation is proving it.
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, and Bahrain all have strong institutional reasons to see Iranian regional power degraded. They're not publicly endorsing the campaign — the domestic politics of Arab publics make that impossible — but the operational cooperation is happening. That's the multilateralism that matters in this conflict. Not French diplomatic cover. Not UN resolutions. Actual intelligence sharing and basing access from states that have skin in the game.
The Nuclear Dimension
Every discussion of the conventional military campaign against Iranian proxies has to reckon with the nuclear program in the background. Iran's uranium enrichment has progressed to levels that put weapons-grade material within reach on short timescales. The 2015 JCPOA paused that program. The maximum pressure campaign that followed Iran's breaches of the agreement — and the Biden administration's failed attempts to renegotiate — left the program running essentially unconstrained.
The conventional campaign against Iranian proxies serves a purpose beyond degrading those proxies. It signals to Tehran that the cost of continued nuclear advancement includes conventional military pressure on assets they value. It's coercive diplomacy with teeth — the kind that the original JCPOA explicitly avoided by separating the nuclear question from the regional behavior question. That separation was always strategic malpractice. Iran's nuclear program and Iran's regional aggression are expressions of the same strategic goal: hegemony backed by deterrence.
Treating them as separate problems produced separate, insufficient solutions. Linking them — which the current campaign effectively does — is strategically coherent in a way that a decade of compartmentalized diplomacy never was.
The Risk Is Real, But So Is the Alternative
None of this is costless. Iranian retaliation is real. The Houthis have disrupted Red Sea shipping in ways that affect global commerce. Hezbollah retains significant rocket and missile capacity. The risk of miscalculation exists. Anyone who claims this campaign carries no risk is either lying or not paying attention.
But the alternative — continued accommodation of Iranian regional power while negotiating on the margins over its nuclear program — has a twenty-year track record of failure. Iran's regional position is stronger today than it was in 2003. Its nuclear program is more advanced. Its proxy network is more capable. That's the outcome of a generation of managed deterrence and diplomatic engagement.
Expanding the campaign is risky. The status quo that the expansion is designed to disrupt has been catastrophic. Choose your risk. The current administration has made its choice, and the strategic logic behind it is sounder than the critics are willing to admit.
