Three service members killed, at least 40 injured in a drone attack. President Biden, who has been briefed on all the options available, said he has now decided what his response will be. He didn't elaborate, but his national security spokesman, John Kirby, suggested it would be a tiered response.

Guiding principle is making sure that we continue to degrade the kinds of capabilities that these groups have at their disposal to use against our troops and our facilities and to send a strong signal to their backers in the IRGC that these attacks are unacceptable, and we're going to do, the President will do what he has to do to protect our troops and our facilities, and to look after our national security our national security interests in the region.

Brad Bowman is a Senior Director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Brad, thank you very much for being with us. What do you take from what you've heard this afternoon? What do you think President Biden and his security team are thinking?

Thanks for the opportunity to join me. I think the Biden administration's clear goal here is to restore deterrence, which was clearly tattered. We've seen more than 100 1967 attacks on US forces in Iraq, in Syria, and now Jordan, with these three service members paying for it with their lives. This administration has to act. There's bipartisan consensus on that. I believe it has to act strongly. It's The premise throughout the last few weeks, at least since October seventh, if not long before that, is that American restraint was the best way to do this. Many Republicans on Capitol Hill worry that that restraint is what got us to this point, and that restraint has been read by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its terror proxies as weakness and a green light for additional aggression.

That's really interesting because I was asking this question last night, whether American first policy, talk of withdrawal, the language from the administration that there needs to be restraint, whether all of that is in fact seen as weakness in Russia, Iran, China. We've seen a tweet today from from Wesley Clark, the former Supreme Commander of NATO, who said, Stop talking about retaliation and restraint. Just go after the people who are sending the bombs, and that's Iran.

Yeah, we sometimes forget. I worked in the US Senate for nine years. We sometimes forget that leaders can't talk to one audience at a time. When you're speaking in Brussels or Washington or Davos, We're talking about restraint and reason and proportionality. It all sounds very good and it earns you cool points. But I do worry, many in Washington worry, that our adversaries hear it very differently. If you're on a playground, you say, Hey, I don't want to fight. I don't want to fight. What do you expect the bully to do? Keep throwing punches. Unfortunately, that's what we've seen both in the Red Sea with the Houthis and also in Iraq and Syria with the Iranian proxies and militias there.

When you talk about a strong response, are you saying that it needs to go beyond a strike on the proxies? Does it have to, in some way, stretch the boundaries of what we might ordinarily consider proportional?

My view is that what the Islamic Republic of Iran is doing is a decades-long strategy where they're the puppet master and they use terror Puppets, proxies around the region. I'm thinking of Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestine, Islamic Jihad, and now the Houthis, to advance Iran's foreign policy objectives while displacing the consequences and the counterpunches onto others, usually Arabs. It's going quite swimmingly for Iran Iran because everyone's focusing on the proxies right now. Meanwhile, Iran is inching toward a nuclear weapons capability and has put, at least on hold for now, normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The bottom line is we can't have our adversaries from an American perspective thinking that they can kill American service members and get away with it. We're going to see a strong response. I predict that much of it will come in Syria, maybe in Iraq. There's some reasons why the administration might want to avoid that. I think if we only go after the proxies and not go after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps elements, particularly in Syria and elsewhere, then it plays right into Iran's puppet master, puppet strategy that I just described.

All that said, you'll have heard our discussion on the deal that's being discussed, was discussed in Paris at the weekend, and also the warnings from the Qatari Prime Minister who was in Washington yesterday that a response that goes too far could complicate the whole process.

That's fine. It's interesting, though. People always express concern about escalation when America is talking about responding. But let me reiterate, 167 attacks since October 17th on US forces. So how would anyone expect the United States to respond? And I think in this moment, the danger really is too weak of a response. But I'll hasten to add, if the administration hits back hard and doesn't take steps to protect American forces, we're going to simply see more American casualties. We saw that after the Solamani killing in January 2020, where we had more than 100 Americans in two bases in Northern Iraq suffered from traumatic brain injury because there wasn't sufficient air and missile defense in the region. So hit them hard, yes, restore deterrence if possible, but expect an escalation, at least in the short term, and make sure you've taken steps in advance to protect American forces. That's what I would be offering to the administration in this moment.

Well, the President has put them on notice. We will keep watching through the night because it sounds like it could be imminent. Brad Bowman, thank you very much indeed for that.Thank you.Thank you.