Leah Millis/Reuters
President Donald Trump speaks to the media after participating in a video teleconference with members of the U.S. military at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, on December 24, 2019.
- The Trump administration does not appear to have a strategy for what's next following the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Iran's top military leader, experts warn.
- Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the killing was aimed at "deterring future Iranian attacks," but with Iran vowing "severe revenge" the assassination could have the opposite effect.
- "The potential for escalation was already high but now is nearly certain," Dalia Dassa Kaye, director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy, told Insider.
- "I don't think there has been serious thinking about the steps post-killing," Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, told Insider.
- Even Republicans, such as Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, emphasized the need for a "coherent strategy" in the Middle East following the news of Soleimani's killing.
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Under orders from President Donald Trump, the US killed a top Iranian general in a drone strike in Iraq on Thursday, sending shockwaves throughout the world and raising fears of a new conflict in the Middle East.
The Middle East has been rocked by instability for years, but experts warn that Trump may have just poured gasoline on the fire - and without a clear strategy on what to do next.
Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani was Iran's most important military leader, who reported only to the country's supreme leader, and the Iranian government has painted his death as an act of "international terrorism" while warning that "harsh retaliation is waiting."
Dalia Dassa Kaye, director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy and a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, told Insider the Iranians are "likely to view this attack as an act of war."
"The potential for escalation was already high but now is nearly certain," Kaye said, before going on to question what the Trump administration's overall aim was in taking out the Iranian general.
"There's also the question of what the US was trying to achieve. Punitive action is not a strategy. If the goal is to reduce Iranian meddling in the region and produce a better nuclear agreement, it's hard to see how this action helps," Kaye said. "It may only lead to more destructive Iranian actions and a spiraling of the conflict throughout the region. We are now at an extremely dangerous moment."
Republicans in Congress are largely supporting Trump's move as the killing of a leader who fueled terrorism, but one senator has raised concerns about the larger Iran strategy. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday as allies distanced themselves from the US and Democrats raised concerns that Trump's decision has put Americans in the region in greater danger.
'I don't think there has been serious thinking about the steps post-killing'
The US and Iran have had an antagonistic relationship for roughly four decades, but Soleimani's killing is among the most provocative moves from either side - even after tensions between the two countries reached historic heights in 2019 with a series of incidents in the Persian Gulf region.
There were widespread fears a new Middle Eastern war was on the horizon amid attacks on oil tankers and facilities over the course of the year as Iran simultaneously took major steps away from the 2015 nuclear deal, which Trump withdrew the US from in May 2018.
Associated Press
FILE - In this Sept. 18, 2016, file photo provided by an official website of the office of the Iranian supreme leader, Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani, center, attends a meeting in Tehran, Iran. Iraqi TV and three Iraqi officials said Friday, Jan. 3, 2020, that Soleimani, the head of Iran's elite Quds Force, has been killed in an airstrike at Baghdad's international airport. (Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP, File)
The Trump administration has claimed that killing Soleimani will help deter future attacks - particularly given the Iranian general was linked to at the deaths of least 608 US troops in Iraq between 2003 and 2011 - but Iran has vowed "severe revenge" for the deadly strike.
Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, told Insider she doesn't think the Trump administration had a coherent strategy when it made the decision to pull the trigger.
"The circumstances surrounding the attack seem to indicate that this was a unique opportunity to kill Soleimani with minimal civilian casualties that was presented to Trump and he made the decision to go for it absent the usual interagency process of gaming such action on different levels," Slim said.
She added: "I don't think there has been serious thinking about the steps post-killing."
'One wonders if the Trump team thought through how it will play out.'
Less than three months ago, Trump said he was moving to end "stupid endless wars" as he justified his controversial decision to abandon US-allied Kurdish forces to a Turkish military invasion in Syria.
Killing Soleimani does not appear to be a step towards ending or deterring endless conflict, with previous administrations choosing not to target Soleimani out of concern it would escalate the conflict.
"The logic of the assassination was to re-establish deterrence, after many months of not responding forcefully to attacks on ships, drones and oil facilities," Mark Fitzpatrick, a former US diplomat and associate fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told Insider. "But one wonders if the Trump team thought through how it will play out."
Fitzpatrick said that the "bitter irony" is that the justification for the assassination was "deterring future Iranian attacks" but suggested it "ensures there will be many more attacks."
REUTERS/Thaier al-Sudani
A member of Iraqi security forces stands near burning tyres at the reception room of the U.S. Embassy, during a protest to condemn air strikes on bases belonging to Hashd al-Shaabi (paramilitary forces), in Baghdad, Iraq January 1, 2020.
'We're in uncharted territory'
Michael Singh, a former senior director for Middle East affairs on the National Security Council under former President George W. Bush who's now at The Washington Institute, told Insider that targeting Soleimani was an "enormously significant act," describing the Iranian general as a "near-mythic figure in the Middle East."
Singh said he would not call Soleimani's killing an "act of war," stating, "It's fairer to characterize it as an act of self-defense...Iran had been targeting Americans in Iraq who were there lawfully to advise and assist the Iraqi government, and it's fair to assume Soleimani was in Iraq partly to oversee those attacks."
At the same time, Singh said it's "hard to say what happens next."
"We're in uncharted territory," Singh said. "The road ahead is uncertain, but certainly a rocky one."
Singh added that Iran will be "highly motivated to retaliate in as spectacular a way as it can, though now it will perhaps be more cognizant that the US is willing to push back."
Iranian proxy forces, including Iraqi Shia militias, will have their own agenda that will include "pushing the US out of Iraq and retaliating for their own significant losses," Singh said.
He went on to say that Soleimani's departure could set off a process of "jockeying for power and influence in Iran's regional power structure that could have nasty external manifestations of their own."
'Trump's disastrous approach to Iran has, from the beginning, been all tactics and no strategy'
Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, echoed such concerns in a statement on Friday.
"President Trump's disastrous approach to Iran has, from the beginning, been all tactics and no strategy. They make it up day by day," Murphy said. "The assassination of Soleimani fits this pattern. I hope I am wrong, but I suspect this White House is totally unprepared for the cascade of consequences that will follow last night's actions. I pray for the Americans who, today, are in harm's way."
Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in an interview with MSNBC on Friday questioned the intelligence behind the killing.
"I have been arguing for some time that the Trump Administration needs to devise a strategy as it relates to Iran and what's our pathway forward," Menendez said. "I fear that this administration used tactics but has no strategy in the long-term. What we cannot accept is a march to an unauthorized war."
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress have generally been highly supportive of Trump in their responses.
"We killed the most powerful man in Tehran short of the Ayatollah. This was not an act of revenge for what he had done in the past," GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, who also sits on the foreign relations committee, said in a tweet. "This was a preemptive, defensive strike planned to take out the organizer of attacks yet to come."
But Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, another member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, raised questions what the next steps were.
The Utah senator in tweets said Soleimani was a "depraved terrorist" with American blood on his hands, adding that he was "doubtlessly planning operations to further harm our citizens and allies."
But Romney went on to say that with "ever increasing challenges confronting us in the Middle East, it's imperative that the US & our allies articulate & pursue a coherent strategy for protecting our security interests in the region."
Romney said he would be pressing the Trump administration for "additional details" in this regard in the days ahead.
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