WASHINGTON — Although weakened and facing a domestic crisis, the Iranian regime still has considerable firepower that could inflict damage on U.S. interests and its allies in the region, disrupt the global economy and trigger a protracted conflict in response to a U.S. military attack, according to former U.S. officials, foreign diplomats and regional analysts.
The prospect of Iranian retaliation was taken into account President Donald Trump’s deliberations on whether to order a military attack on Iran after strikes on its nuclear program in June, as well as discussions between the United States and its allies in the Middle East, according to current U.S. officials.
While Iran retaliated in June against Israel and a U.S. base in Qatar, it refrained from taking more dramatic steps that could have caused casualties among U.S. forces or destabilized Persian Gulf economies. Iran’s response to U.S. military action could be very different this time if Trump makes that decision, the former officials, diplomats and analysts said, particularly if Iran’s leaders perceive a threat to their survival.
“What might be different this time is they try to regionalize this, instead of just going after Israel or U.S. bases,” said Joseph Votel, a retired four-star Army general who oversaw U.S. forces in the Middle East during Trump’s first term.
Votel, now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a think tank, said one possibility would be that Iran would try to target the oil refineries of Persian Gulf states in an effort to “drag everyone into this and turn this into a much more protracted conflict.”
The United States and Iran are expected to hold a new round of diplomatic negotiations as early as Thursday, according to administration officials. Administration officials have said Iran must make major concessions on its nuclear program, including abandoning uranium enrichment, to avoid possible U.S. military action.
Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, who is leading Iran negotiations with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, said over the weekend that “there are red lines: zero enrichment, we have to get the material back.”
When asked in a Fox News interview why Iran wouldn’t make a deal with the United States under such intense military and economic pressure, Witkoff said Trump asked him the same question. “It’s curious why they didn’t capitulate, I don’t want to use the word ‘capitulated,’ but why they didn’t capitulate,” Witkoff said.
Trump is considering a range of military options if diplomatic efforts fail – from limited strikes targeting nuclear and missile sites to a broader attack aimed at weakening or even toppling the regime. NBC News reported.
But what Trump considers “limited” cannot be interpreted that way by Iran, particularly if Iranian leaders believe the regime’s survival is at stake, according to former U.S. officials, foreign diplomats and regional analysts.
“If they see this as an existential threat … their reaction will certainly be disproportionate,” a Middle East diplomat said of Iranian leaders.
Iran has suffered debilitating setbacks over the past year with the fall of the Assad regime in neighboring Syria, the devastation of its Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon and the U.S. and Israeli bombing of its nuclear and missile programs in June.
But Tehran still has a large stockpile of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones, and it could try to retaliate with strikes across the Persian Gulf in an effort to sow economic instability and alarm U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
Iran could calibrate its response based on the scale of the U.S. attack and intensify its actions if leaders perceive a U.S. attempt to topple the regime, said Joseph Costa of the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.
“Iran could calculate that it has to increase the costs of war,” said Costa, who helped oversee war planning as a senior Defense Department official during the Biden administration.
Last month, some Arab state leaders privately expressed concerns to administration officials about Trump’s Iranian strikes at the time because they were unsure whether their countries were prepared to respond to possible Iranian retaliation. NBC News reported. In recent days, however, those leaders have been reassured that the United States will ensure they are protected against any retaliation from Iran, according to three senior Middle East diplomats.
Trump criticized Monday reports indicating that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine expressed concerns about the lack of adequate air defense munitions in the region to respond to a retaliatory attack from Iran.
“General Caine, like all of us, would like to not see war, but if a decision is made to confront Iran militarily, he believes it will be something easy to win,” Trump said on Truth Social, his social networking site. “I’m the one who makes the decision, I would rather have a deal than not, but if we don’t make a deal it will be a very bad day for this country and, very unfortunately, for its people, because they are great and wonderful, and something like this should never have happened to them.”
The United States has strengthened its air defenses in the region, including in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, to help soften the impact of any Iranian retaliatory attack, according to two people familiar with the matter. They indicated that the large contingent of naval forces deployed in the region, including the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and the aircraft carrier Ford, which is should happen in the coming days, contribute not only offensive but also defensive forces in the region in case the United States mounts an attack and Iran retaliates.
The United States also has numerous squadrons of jet fighters and other military hardware. deployed in the region.
The possibility of American strikes, which could be a joint operation with Israeli forces, could pose a grave danger to the more than 30,000 U.S. troops stationed in the region, former U.S. officials, foreign diplomats and regional analysts said. And they said defending those troops could be a lingering problem in the region for weeks or even months.
More than 35,000 people are stationed in and around the Middle East, at sprawling bases in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and elsewhere. Many of these service members are accompanied by their families to these installations, including the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.
But for now, the massive accumulation of military equipment in the region could significantly mitigate any Iranian retaliation, said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Last month, when anti-regime protests swept Iran and Trump threatened to intervene, the United States had enough military capabilities in the region to launch a punitive strike, but not enough to adequately protect its allies and partners, he said. Today, he says, it appears the United States does indeed have that capability.
Hossein Kanani, a former officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, told NBC News that if the United States attacked, Iran would target U.S. bases in the region overseen by U.S. Central Command, including Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. He also said Tehran could attack European military installations elsewhere if those countries took part in a campaign against Iran, although no European country has indicated it might join the United States in a military operation in Iran.
“As you know, we do not like that there is a conflict between Arab countries and Iran,” Kanani said via video call from Tehran. “We only directly attack the bases of the United States and Israel. And European countries, perhaps NATO.”
Iran’s U.N. mission in New York did not respond to a request for comment.
Iran has three ways to retaliate against the United States and, potentially, its allies, experts say. They said its leaders could resort to missile strikes; proxy attacks, including the activation of Hamas, Hezbollah or the Houthis, for example; or terrorist attacks around the world.
“US forces in theater provide substantial protection against missile and proxy attacks, although no defense is perfect,” Cancian said, adding that if Iran launched a terrorist attack somewhere outside the region, it would most likely amount to an attack on civilians that would provoke deep international outrage.
After the June airstrikes in Iran, German and Danish authorities uncovered an Iran-linked plot targeting Jewish institutions and the Jewish people. in Germany. Israel issued a warning about possible Iranian attacks in the United Arab Emirates, and U.S. officials issued a terrorism advisory warning of possible Iranian plots on American soil.
“There are risks in all of this. None of this is foolproof,” said Votel, the retired general.
