Iran War: coercive diplomacy and brute force

For seven consecutive nights, the United States has maintained a sustained campaign of strikes against Iran which has responded with missile and drone attacks on American and regional targets. At this stage, I see this conflict as a continuation of coercive diplomacy and not war.

Coercive diplomacy is not war in the traditional sense. It is the calibrated use or threat of limited force designed to compel an opponent to alter its behaviour without seeking its outright military defeat. Technically, only when the US resorts to the use of brute force will the phase of coercive diplomacy in this conflict end. The transition of the US strategy from coercive diplomacy to a full-blown war would take place when the USA's higher sense of purpose in this conflict is no longer to influence Iran through coercive means but to impose its will by force and defeat it. History tells us that this will not be possible while fighting this war with limited force. The big question on the minds of the US political leadership and military strategists at this stage would be – Do we want a temporary/tactical success or do we want a strategic/lasting success?

Success could have come at a cheap cost if coercive diplomacy had succeeded. Even at this stage, if the use of limited force helps the US achieve its political goal, the success will be considered costly. The current escalation in the conflict demonstrates that the use of limited force by the US to achieve its political objective is on the threshold of failing. This means that the use of coercive diplomacy is also nearing its culminating point. Ideally, the use of coercive diplomacy should have resolved this crisis or armed conflict without resorting to full-scale war. The symbolic and demonstrative use of the stick by the US was designed to instil fear and cause Iranian compliance, but that is not happening. The use of inducements and threats and limited war were the two drivers of this coercive diplomacy, but the Iranian non-compliance has resulted in its failure. In its current stage, the conflict appears to be approaching the threshold where coercive diplomacy risks giving way to brute force. Now, in the absence of good sense, there is all the likelihood of the use of brute force and a full-scale war.

Coercive diplomacy became central to Western conflict management after World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. According to Peter Viggo Jakobsen, a total of 21 coercive diplomacy exchanges took place between Western states and various states in eight different conflicts, and only one resulted in success by use of threats and sanctions. It was in 2001, when Pakistan agreed to stop supporting the Taliban and join hands with the US to fight the war on terror. The rest were settled either through the use of limited force (Kosovo, Libya, Haiti, Somalia, Syria), or the use of brute force (Afghanistan, Iraq). In the case of the first Iraq War, the air campaign and use of limited war failed to deliver Iraqi compliance. The war that followed the air campaign signaled a shift from coercive diplomacy to the use of brute force. When the US could no longer persuade Saddam Hussein, it decided to force Iraq to vacate Kuwait through a physical assault on the ground. The use of coercive diplomacy against the Taliban also failed as they refused to hand over Osama bin Laden and cease support of al-Qaeda. What followed was the use of brute force and a twenty-year-long war in Afghanistan.

Over the years, why coercive diplomacy has given mixed and poor results has got everything to do with the nature of this strategy – it is contradictory. It frightens as well as reassures the adversary. It frightens the adversary with the permanently hanging sword of Damocles – the fear of uncontrollable aggression. This only hardens an adversary's motivation and will to resist. The parallel inducements and the reassurances that a coercer offers are also perceived differently by the aggressed, not as inducements but as visible signs of weakness. This forces the aggressed to misperceive the good intent, resulting in unwanted miscalculations and reduced incentive for opponents to comply. This is exactly what happened in the case of the Taliban in Afghanistan and in the case of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

For coercive diplomacy to succeed, the coercer's credibility is of extreme importance to the opponent. Iran's original nuclear deal, JCPOA, was set aside by the Trump administration. The twelve-day war – fought from June 13 to 25 between Iran and Israel and later joined by the US – ended when a Qatar-mediated ceasefire took effect. Yet, peace could not hold, and Iran was once again attacked this year. From Tehran's perspective, compliance carries strategic risks because every concession may invite additional demands. Maintaining resistance therefore becomes not merely ideological but a means of preserving deterrence and bargaining leverage. Iran fears compliance because it may result in new demands. In 1939, the Soviet Union asked Finland to hand over a few Islands. The Finns feared that if they fulfilled this Soviet demand, new demands would follow, so they refused to hand over the Islands, which resulted in the Winter War.

From the coercer's perspective, misunderstanding the adversary's resilience and will to fight can lead to a protracted war. In the case of Iran, the US has only inflamed the country's nationalism and national enthusiasm by labeling it as part of the Axis of evil, rogue, irrational, fanatical, crazy and uncivilised. Threatening it with regime change, assassination of its leadership through military strikes, and pushing it back to the Stone Age, the US has inadvertently left Iran with no option but to consider itself in a no-win situation. With Iran's vital interests at stake, both its leadership and the public are mobilised to see this conflict in zero-sum terms.

Whether the United States ultimately abandons coercive diplomacy in favour of brute force remains uncertain. What appears increasingly clear, however, is that the effectiveness of calibrated military pressure is diminishing as Iranian resistance hardens. Yet crossing the threshold into a large-scale ground campaign would entail political, military and economic costs that Washington has sought to avoid since the experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States therefore faces a strategic dilemma: persist with a coercive strategy that is yielding diminishing returns, or escalate to a form of warfare whose consequences may far exceed its anticipated benefits. For now, history suggests that prudence should prevail over escalation.