Why Is Harris Obsessed With Iran?

The U.S. Vice President and the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, showed a worryingly shallow grasp of the nation’s national security challenges by calling Iran America’s “greatest adversary” in a Tuesday interview with CBS News’s 60 Minutes. She elaborated that “Iran has American blood on its hands” and referred to the “200 ballistic missiles” it fired on Israel.

In a world of a great-power rivalry with the nuclear-armed peer competitors China and Russia, to present a remote Middle Eastern country—hobbled by a plethora of U.S. sanctions, highly vulnerable to alleged acts of sabotage by Israel, with literally no allies besides militias in a handful of failed states—as the main threat to the United States is entirely absurd. Even with its arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones, Iran is no threat to the U.S., which it has no capability and no interest to attack.

Rather, the only conceivable threat from Iran to the U.S. comes from the Iranian proxy groups in Syria and Iraq—it is in those countries where Iran, presumably, got its hands soaked in that American blood. The question that she ought to be asking is, Why are American troops still in those lands? With the boiling tensions between Israel and Iran, and the nearly unconditional support that the Biden administration is offering Israel, those U.S. soldiers have merely become targets for attacks by an array of pro-Iranian Shiite groups in Iraq and Syria, with no discernible upside for Washington. 

Harris’s second argument of why Iran represents a particularly acute threat didn’t have anything to do with the U.S. interests at all, but rather with a country with which the U.S. doesn’t even have a formal security alliance: Israel. Iran’s attack on Israel is certainly a concerning development from the point of view of regional security. 

It has to be viewed in an overall context of mounting tensions, the escalation of which Israel contributed to by lethally attacking the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, assassinating Hamas’s political leader in Tehran on the day of the inauguration of the Iranian president Massoud Pezeshkian, and moving the goalposts in Lebanon from ensuring that the Israeli residents of the regions adjacent to the Lebanese border could return to their homes to seeking a destruction of Hezbollah, a key ally for Tehran. Whatever the rationale behind the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bellicosity, Harris never explained how supporting it all the way, while risking being drawn in a war with Iran, serves an American interest. 

As the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy’s Arta Moeini quipped, such “nonsensical statements are good for the Iranian ego, but they are fantasy at best and fear-mongering at worst….They show Harris’s lack of elementary knowledge of international politics, not to mention a basic sense of proportion and common sense”.  

Some observers, like the Stimson Center’s Emma Ashford, see a possible electoral motivation behind Harris’s fresh hawkishness. Nevertheless, Ashford is also skeptical that swinging so hard in that direction—including boasting endorsements from such war hawks as the former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, the former Rep. Liz Cheney—will attract many voters. 

That would be a good occasion for Harris’s Republican opponent Donald Trump to chart a course in an opposite direction. As the conservative restrainer William Ruger, Trump’s nominee for the post of the ambassador in Afghanistan during his presidency, advised, Trump should talk about how “he isn’t going to send our children, our brothers, our sisters, our fathers, and our mothers into more wars disconnected from our core national interests”. 

Trump himself occasionally displayed a restrained streak. Nevertheless, the Republican party still, by and large, views Iran as a bogeyman. Trump, while in theory opposed to “forever wars,” just carelessly advised Israel to bomb Iran’s nuclear infrastructure as a response to Iran’s firing of missiles on Israel, and “worry about the rest later”. That is highly irresponsible advice, as Iran promised to retaliate further for any Israeli strike. This could lead to an all-out regional war in the Middle East which Trump would have to deal with should he be elected in November. 

In fact, during his presidency Trump already tried a “strike first and think later” approach: when he ordered the assassination of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020. By sheer luck, Iranian retaliation did not claim any American lives then, and Trump, much to his obvious relief, did not have to commit the U.S. to a war with Iran.

Such luck may not accompany U.S. presidents forever. It is therefore incumbent on them, whether Democratic or Republican, to avoid needless belligerence towards Iran, particularly on behalf of third countries. Washington and Tehran are unlikely to be friends in the foreseeable future—political obstacles for that are just too high on both sides—but there is no challenge Iran currently presents that would require the U.S. to go to war. The first step to recognizing that reality would be to challenge Harris’s mindless threat-inflation.