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Kenneth M. Pollack is a resident scholar of the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness.”

Is the United States going to war with Iran? Probably not.

Should the United States go to war with Iran? Probably not.

Now that that’s out of the way, we can unpack the current tensions with Iran, where they are likely to lead, and the potential pitfalls the United States should avoid on the road ahead.

It is unlikely that we will find ourselves in a war with Iran in the near term because both sides are eager to avoid one. Although some of President Trump’s advisors may welcome a clash with Tehran, he has consistently made clear that he wants to end American wars in the Middle East, not start new ones. That has been behind his impetus to pull U.S. troops out of Syria and his unwillingness to become further involved in the Yemeni civil war.

On the other side of the Persian Gulf, Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i, Iran’s Supreme Leader announced that there would be no war.  In case you don’t believe him, the Iranians have typically shown enormous respect for American conventional military power since they were shellacked by it in the late 1980s. They know full well that in a full-on war, the U.S. would do tremendous damage to Iran’s armed forces and could threaten the regime’s grip on power – which is the very thing they are seeking to avoid.

Of course, just because two countries don’t want a war doesn’t mean that they won’t stumble into one anyway. Given the current tensions created by the American pressure on Iran and Tehran’s nascent efforts to push back, the deployment of additional American military forces to the region, and the tendency for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to occasionally take unauthorized aggressive actions, no one should rule out an unintended clash. Even then, however, the most likely scenario would be a limited American retaliatory strike to demonstrate to Iran that Washington won’t be pushed around by a 98-pound weakling and that Tehran needs to keep its problem children under control.

Over the longer term, there are other threats. Because of its conventional military weakness compared to the U.S. (and Israel), Iran has typically preferred to employ terrorism and cyber attacks – more often directed at American allies than at the U.S. itself – to create problems for Washington without creating a pretext for a major U.S. military response. We’ve already seen that begin with mysterious attacks on Saudi oil tankers off the coast of the UAE, and drone strikes by Iran’s Houthi allies on Saudi oil pipelines. These attacks have the twin benefits for Iran of hurting (and potentially humiliating) a key American ally while simultaneously jacking up the price of oil. In the past, the Iranians have also mounted cyber-attacks on the computer network of Saudi Aramco, the company that controls the Saudi oil network.

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