How Iran could respond to U.S. strikes

NPR’s Scott Detrow talks with Dr. Afshon Ostovar about Iran’s perspective after the U.S. launched airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, in response to the killing of U.S. military members in Jordan.

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

For the second day in a row now, the U.S. has launched retaliatory strikes against Iran-linked targets in the Middle East. Today, strikes conducted by both the U.S. and the U.K. hit targets in Yemen, and those followed dozens of U.S. air and missile strikes yesterday that hit Iranian-linked targets in Syria and Iraq. All of these are a response to a drone attack by an Iran-backed militia last Sunday that killed three American service members in Jordan. Yesterday, strikes hit targets at facilities used by Iranian forces, though none of the strikes were in Iran itself.

This all leads to questions about whether the Israel-Gaza war could widen into a full-blown conflict between the U.S. and Iran. We want to understand how Iran might respond to U.S. attacks, so earlier today, we called up Afshon Ostovar, associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He’s also the author of the upcoming book “Wars Of Ambition: The United States, Iran, And The Struggle For The Middle East.” I asked him what he thinks Iran will do next.

AFSHON OSTOVAR: Well, honestly, I don’t think much is going to happen in terms of what Iran does. I think Iran’s proxies, particularly in Iraq and Syria, will continue to do what they’ve been doing, which is launching intermittent rocket attacks against U.S. bases. It may not happen tomorrow, but it’ll happen in the coming days and weeks. Iran is pretty limited in what it can do, frankly. If it does anything directly, it would trigger a war, most likely with the United States, and it knows this. So it works through proxies in order to keep the violence away from Iran’s doorstep but also below the threshold of war with the United States.

DETROW: I mean, you’re…