Biden’s First Military Attack Should Wake Up Iran

In the Middle East, when leaders react to a provocation by reserving “the right to respond at the time and place of our choosing,” it is usually the tell of a weak hand. Consider how often the regime in Tehran has deployed that turn of phrase — most recently, against the U.S., after the killing of the military commander Qassem Soleimani, and against Israel, after the killing of the nuclear-weapons expert Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. The louder the threats, the emptier they tend to be.

So when the shibboleth is intoned by the enemy, the Iranians tend to assume that it, too, must be mere bluster. They didn’t believe the Trump administration’s warnings of retaliation for the killing of American servicemen in Iraq, and they seem to have ignored a similar admonition from the Biden administration.