Performative sanctions have long been the last refuge of the lazy policymaker looking to ‘do something’. Take, for instance, the sanctions that are slapped on unsavoury individuals from around the world on an almost-weekly basis: Turkish assassins, Iranian guerrilla commanders, Somali pirates, and Yemeni rebels are among those who have been whacked with the sanctions stick. Unsurprisingly, nobody has repented as a result of being listed, meaning that the sanctions roster is a government naughty list and little more. After more than a decade of performative sanctions, the public is slowly cottoning onto the fact that they don’t seem to offer much. Amidst this scrutiny, policymakers are increasingly drawn to what might be called the performative airstrike.
On Friday night, the U.S. bombed Iraq and Syria in response to the killing of three U.S. service-members. On Saturday night, a U.S.-UK airstrikes hit targets in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a. In both cases, thousands of pounds of ordinance projected a voter-friendly image of fire and fury. But like any theatrical production, the real action happens backstage.
In recent months, that has meant giving Tehran, Baghdad, Sana’a, and Damascus advance notice of airstrikes as to prevent Iran and its proxies from taking casualties (perish the thought). The only real difference between performative sanctions and their explosive equivalent is the slightly more convoluted choreography: a warning is issued, the airstrikes happen, the statements are released, another provocation happens, and another round begins. This weekend’s airstrikes offer a textbook example of the performative airstrike and its ineffectiveness.
In case Iran didn’t get the memo, U.S. officials told Sky News Arabic that B-1 bombers were leaving RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk
In Iraq and Syria, the U.S. claimed to have hit over 85 targets using over 125 precision munitions. The target set – confined to the borderlands between Iraq and Syria – was obvious ahead of time to amateur Middle East watchers. Iran’s bases in the area have been hardened over nearly seven years and are not infrequently bombed by the Israeli Air Force.
The Iranians surely knew ahead of time, and did not need to rely on deduction: the United States apparently let them know ahead of time, giving them seven days to get out of dodge. Syrian opposition media reported large convoys of Iranian officers leaving the cities of Deir al-Zor, al-Mayadeen, and Al-Bukamal days before the airstrikes. In case they didn’t get the memo, U.S. officials told Sky News Arabic that B-1 bombers were leaving RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk – hours before the bombs actually hit. Later that Friday night, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) released a statement saying that none of their men were ‘martyred’. Hours later, U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria were yet again targeted by Iran-backed Iraqi proxies.
Talk of ‘degrading’ the capabilities of Iran and its Iraqi and Syrian proxies is empty. Iran owns Damascus, literally and figuratively, so it is playing on home turf. This map of Iranian facilities in Syria sums up the extent of its presence. Besides strikes on Iran’s key Syrian command nodes, carried out in many waves over many days, plus a subsequent commitment to a long Syrian campaign, it is hard to see how U.S. airstrikes could meaningfully damage Iran’s ability to harm U.S. troops and assets.
Iraq, meanwhile, is not yet a satrapy. But it is getting there. Iraq is home to well over 150,000 Iran-backed militants. It borders Iran. Iran-backed parties wield enormous political power in Baghdad. The government in Baghdad, unlike Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, is internationally recognised and is under growing pressure to expel the United States, so an overly-aggressive policy could give Tehran what it wants. Note the White House’s ongoing attempts to normalise the cringe-worthy term ‘precision self-defense strike’.
In Yemen, allied airstrikes have been performative from the start. On 11 January, some twelve hours before the first wave of U.S.-UK airstrikes on Yemen, the Behshad – an Iranian signals intelligence ship that lights up targets for Houthi missiles – left the Red Sea for the first time since 2021. Tehran knew what was coming, so the Houthis did too.
Around the same time, Yemeni sources on Telegram posted evacuation orders in Sana’a and Hodeida. Unlike Iraq and Syria, though, the Red Sea is harder to ignore. Nearly a month later, the dance is ongoing. The Houthis are starting to make a serious dent on international trade, and it is becoming a problem. Saturday’s airstrikes hit 30 targets in and around the Yemeni capital. But the Houthis show no sign of relenting and true to form, tried to retaliate with a cruise missile just minutes after the smoke cleared in Sana’a.
The U.S. and UK are not the first to bomb the Houthis. From March 2015 to March 2022, a Saudi-led coalition (which the Biden administration derailed) launched tens of thousands of airstrikes on Yemen. Politics aside, we even face the same set of tactical problems. The Houthis rely on mobile launchers: even if a target is identified, it can be moved fast enough to complicate a counterstrike. Weather conditions above Yemen are often poor. Human intelligence is hard to come by, as the Houthi movement is mostly composed of a small number of Zaydi tribes from northern Yemen. ‘Degrading’ the Houthis capabilities would require a major campaign – one that would likely require the West to come crawling back to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. So long as the Houthis can take pot-shots at tankers and freight ships, they can continue to cause problems for global trade.
In 1956, Henry Kissinger lamented that the American effort against the Soviet Union looked like ‘any contest between a professional and an amateur. Even a mediocre professional will usually defeat an excellent amateur, not because the amateur does not know what to do, but because he cannot react sufficiently quickly or consistently.’ Like performative sanctions, performative airstrikes are a tell-tale sign of amateurism. They are reactive. They impose insufficient costs. They undermine the gravity of kinetic military action as a component of strategy. They trivialise foreign policy. They weaken one of the most powerful pieces of leverage the West has in the region: crudely put, our ability to destroy things. The main difference between the pageantry of recent weeks and good old-fashioned airstrikes is that the latter is a component of a strategy. Policy Exchange has been trying to fill the strategic void with fresh thinking for nearly a year, but to little avail.
Compare our current dithering with the elegant, maleficent simplicity of Iranian strategy. The main element is linkage. Low-cost, low-level military pressure in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq equates to leverage, which is compounded as a set of interlocking crises. Western policymakers define their success with the remarkably low bar of ‘avoiding escalation’ and operate in the context of pending elections, with all the incumbents trending downward in the polls. Iran offers them a way out: pressure Israel into a permanent cease-fire in Gaza – one that keeps Hamas in power and bolsters it in the West Bank – and the problems all go away. That outcome would, of course, humiliate the West, act as an aphrodisiac for its global rivals, and be the ultimate proof of concept for Iran’s way of war. That’s precisely the point.
The sad part is that, as we exhaust our options for performative sanctions, performative airstrikes, and all other forms of fence-sitting, that outcome looks increasingly likely.
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