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Iran’s surprise attack on U.S. forces in Jordan is threatening to blow up the temporary pause in fighting between the two sides.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fired ballistic missiles at U.S. forces in Jordan on Tuesday evening, before the U.S. and Saudi Arabia hours later launched strikes on Tehran-backed militias in Iraq, raising the risk of a return to all-out war.
The skirmishes on multiple fronts underscore the difficulty of ending the conflict, which President Trump said would last four to five weeks in March, but is now about to enter its sixth month.
Will Todman, a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said that while neither side may want to return to a full conflict, Iran does not feel “satisfied” with where things stand “Although I still don’t think that either side wants a resumption of all-out war, they do seem to think that continuing to put military pressure on the U.S. will force a greater compromises in the negotiations, and we understand that some quiet negotiations are going on at the moment,” Todman said in an interview with The Hill on Wednesday.
Trump put out a forceful response to Iran’s surprise attack on Jordan, telling Fox News Wednesday morning that the U.S. will “beat the f—ing s— out of them.”
Trump later on Wednesday that it is the U.S. military’s “turn” to strike Iran after the IRGC fired five ballistic missiles at a U.S. base in Jordan.
“In the meantime, we’re going to be hitting them very hard because it’s our turn to hit them. They know it’s coming. They’re asking us not to do it, but you know they tried shooting it last night,” the president told reporters at the White House.
Trump claimed that Iran is asking the U.S. not to unleash another round of strikes, adding “we’ll see if we get there with an agreement at some point.”
He then emphasized that U.S. forces will hit Iran “very hard.”
Ret. Marine Corps Col. Ray Gerber said that from an intelligence perspective, Iran’s firing at Jordan indicates that Tehran and its regional proxies are carrying out “systematic targeting” of U.S. support infrastructure throughout the region. They are also moving from closer sites in Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar to those further away in Jordan.
“We’re punitively striking Iran to try to bring them back to the negotiating table and Iran is absorbing that cost and is still capable of attacking back to extract its own punitive cost on us,” Gerber said in an interview on Wednesday.
“It’s not clear to me that our airstrikes are effective against those type of Iranian capabilities.”
The exchange of fire on Tuesday came after Trump paused strikes against Iran over the weekend to leave some breathing room for diplomatic talks. Trump told reporters on Monday that Iran asked for a meeting with U.S. officials.
The halt came as the commander-in-chief was considering greenlighting major combat operations against Iran, efforts supported by GOP defense hawks in Congress. Trump held off, reportedly in part over diminishing munitions stockpiles and worries of the conflict expanding further.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said the U.S. military’s munition stockpiles are in “good shape.”
“I don’t think a lot of what is being bandied about in the press is accurate,” Wicker told reporters on Monday evening.
The U.S. had more than 2,300 Patriot interceptors before the conflict began and that number has fallen significantly. It is estimated the military now has between 759 and 827 interceptors, according to a new open-source analysis by CSIS, which was published on Monday.
The U.S. now has between 234 and 278 Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors, a 38 percent downgrade from the 452 figure before the war.
Because of the shrinking inventories, the U.S. and its coalition partners may be forced to “take more risks with interceptions,” analysts wrote in the assessment.
“There are no good alternatives to Patriot and THAAD for ballistic missile defense,” they wrote. “Navy ships, with Standard Missiles that can intercept such threats, generally are too far away.”
Saudi Arabia joined the U.S. in its attack on Iran-allied militias in Iraq late Tuesday, killing over 20 fighters of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). The strikes on Iraqi land were condemned by the country’s presidency, calling it a violation of its sovereignty.
Gerber, who commanded the Marine Corps Embassy Security Group Region 2, said Tehran has “acted almost as a break” on the Iranian-backed forces in Iraq “as much as an enabler,” warning the kinetic action could further inflame the conflict.
“My concern is that Saudi actions being perceived as part of the United States, Israel and now Saudi Arabia striking Shia elements throughout the region- Iran, Iraqi Shia PMF and Houthi could horizontally escalate the conflict and add another dimension to what Washington has to calculate against,” he said.
Egypt was also hit for the first time, with vessels, including a U.S.-owned tanker, being lit on fire after an explosion at a shipping hub, according to Kpler. The blast came from a drone attack, Reuters reported, quoting Ambrey, an England-based maritime risk management firm.
The president said on Wednesday that he was briefed on the incident, but did not reveal the cause of the explosion.
“It’s a little more of the same, but it’s going to be straightening out. It’s going to be straightening out,” Trump told reporters.
Following the Tuesday strikes, the price of Brent crude oil went up, while commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz is still sparse, with 12 successful crossings on Tuesday, according to data analytics giant Kpler.
“Yet higher traffic should not be mistaken for lower risk. Hormuz routing remains concentrated outside traditional traffic separation patterns, while Bab el-Mandeb continues to present elevated operational and compliance challenges through dark transits, sanctioned vessels and shadow fleet movements,” Kpler said Wednesday morning.
Since early May, U.S. forces have helped around 1,000 vessels and 500 million barrels of crude oil pass through the waterway, Centcom said Wednesday.
The U.S. military has continued to enforce the blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, having redirected 20 commercial vessels either flowing or departing Iranian ports, along with disabling two and boarding another two since the effort was resumed on July 14, according to Centcom.
The public view of the conflict has soured and now the majority of Americans, 55 percent, believe that U.S. military action against Iran will last either around a year or longer, a new poll from Quinnipiac University found, marking a jump from April when just 32 percent said the same.
“The pushback is evident. Six in 10 voters want no part of military action against Iran. More than seven in 10 say putting troops on Iranian soil is a no-go,” Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy said. “And if the war drags on, more than half of voters predict it will last a year or more.”
Todman, of CSIS, argued that these skirmishes between the U.S. and Iran are part of a “new normal” that will likely endure for “some time,” unless a major event turns out to be an inflection point for both sides.
“Both sides have not agreed to an outcome on any number of issues, and so any period of calm, I think, is inevitably going to be short-lived as each side continues to try to pursue its desired end state,” Todman said.
“But until there are more serious negotiations, and fundamentally, until both sides make sufficient concessions to get to an agreement, then I think this is the pattern that we’re likely to see for some time going forward,” he said.
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