Iran and the imminent threat mythology

If you have followed American foreign policy debates over the past three decades, you will have noticed a peculiar and remarkably durable ritual: the periodic rediscovery that Iran is on the verge of doing something catastrophic to the United States.

The mullahs are always, it seems, just months away from a nuclear weapon, just weeks away from unleashing a regional conflagration or just days away from striking American interests in some dramatic and destabilizing fashion.

And yet, here we are. The question of whether Iran poses an imminent threat to the US is not merely a strategic or intelligence assessment — it is, at its core, a political one. And in Washington, political questions about Iran have a way of being answered before the evidence is fully examined.

Let us be clear about what “imminent threat” actually means under both international law and common sense. It means a credible, specific and immediate danger — not a generalized hostility, not a long-term adversarial posture, and certainly not the kind of ambient menace that serves as useful backdrop for defense budget requests and hawkish op-eds.

By that rigorous standard, the case against Iran has always been considerably weaker than its proponents suggest.

Iran is, without question, a revisionist regional power with a foreign policy that frequently conflicts with American interests. It supports Hezbollah, backs various militias across Iraq and Syria, and has long sought to project influence across the Middle East in ways that unsettle both Washington and its Gulf Arab allies.

None of that is in dispute. But regional ambition and proxy influence — activities, incidentally, that the US itself engages in on a rather grand scale — do not constitute an imminent threat to the American homeland or even to core US security interests.

The intellectual sleight of hand that the Iran hawks consistently perform is to conflate hostility with imminence, and capability with intent. Iran has hostile intent toward American influence in the region. It has some capability to harass US forces and allies.

But the leap from those observations to the conclusion that Tehran is on the cusp of launching a devastating attack on the US requires a considerable suspension of strategic logic. Iran’s leadership, whatever else one thinks of them, has demonstrated over four decades a keen instinct for self-preservation. They are brutal authoritarians, not suicidal ones.

One must also reckon honestly with the institutional incentives at play. The Washington foreign policy establishment — think tanks, contractors, retired generals cycling through cable news studios and the ever-present lobbying apparatus of regional allies — has a structural interest in magnifying the Iranian threat.

A manageable Iran is far less useful to these actors than an existential Iran. The inflation of threat assessments is not always cynical; sometimes it is simply the product of a professional culture that rewards alarm over sobriety.

This is not to argue for naivety about Tehran. A foreign policy realist takes Iran seriously — its regional influence, its nuclear program, its sponsorship of armed groups.

What realism demands, however, is proportionality. And proportionality requires distinguishing between a country that is an irritant, a spoiler and a regional troublemaker, and one that poses the kind of clear and present danger to American security that would justify military escalation, regime change fantasies or the kind of maximalist pressure campaigns that have repeatedly failed to alter Iranian behavior while strengthening hardliners in Tehran.

The lesson of Iraq should not have to be relearned with Iranian subtitles. In 2003, the “imminent threat” framework was deployed to devastating effect — launching a war that destabilized the region, cost thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and, with exquisite irony, dramatically expanded Iranian influence across the Middle East.

The threat inflators of that era faced no serious professional reckoning. Many of them are still at it today, making the same arguments with the same confidence, about a different country on the same map.

American interests in the Middle East are real but finite. They do not require the US to treat every Iranian provocation as a casus belli, nor do they require Washington to serve as the enforcer of every regional ally’s security preferences. A mature great power calibrates its responses to actual threats rather than to the anxieties — sometimes genuine, sometimes manufactured — of interested parties.

Iran poses serious challenges, but it is not an imminent threat to the US. That distinction matters enormously, and the failure to maintain it has already cost America dearly.

This article was originally published on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is republished with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.