The White House traded barbs with Tehran on Tuesday over the Trump administration's "putting Iran on notice" – a phrase first uttered by National Security Adviser Michael Flynn last week and which administration officials have repeatedly labeled as self-explanatory despite broad confusion among those who work on Iran policy.
To some, the move in the wake of an Iranian missile test clears the way for U. S. plans to strike at Iran itself, rather than continuing President Barack Obama's tactics of containing Tehran by undermining its foreign interests. To others, it's a way to brand as different what has so far been a strategy that continues on the last administration's Iran legacy.
Either way, it has caught Tehran's attention. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei thanked President Donald Trump on Tuesday for showing the world "the true face" of America and called on Iranians to defiantly demonstrate on Friday, the anniversary of the country's 1979 Islamic Revolution. White House spokesman Sean Spicer fired back in a press conference later in the day, saying Iran needs to realize "there's a new president in town" and that Trump "is not going to sit by" while Iran flouts "its violations or its apparent violations" of international agreements restricting its nuclear ambitions.
James Stavridis, a retired Navy admiral who served as NATO's supreme allied commander for Europe, interprets the phrase as the administration's stating it will act at a time and place of its choosing.
"In that sense, it's the opposite of a red line. It says, 'We're watching you carefully, we're very displeased with what we're seeing, we're not going to be predictable and we will, if necessary, take action, '" Stavridis says. "That's how I interpret it, but I think the administration owes us a clearer explanation. "
Whether intended or not, the vagueness of Trump's declaration to Iran provides the White House with the rhetorical cover were it to order a harsher military response to Iranian aggression – a preemptive, "We warned you. " And if the last few years serves as any precedent, such an encounter would most likely come in response to what has become a pattern of provocation from the navy of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
"The Obama administration was incredibly restrained in response to the IRGC navy. I could easily imagine that the Trump administration would relax the rules of engagement and give local ship commanders more authority to use lethal force, " says Gary Samore, Obama's former coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction, now with Harvard University's Belfer Center.
Officials in Washington have expressed deep concern over frequent and belligerent encounters between IRGC ships and U. S. Navy vessels in the Persian Gulf and off the coast of Yemen, where proxy war wages between U. S. and Saudi-backed fighters and the Iranian-sponsored Houthis.
Trump and many of his campaign advisers who have assumed positions in his national security staff were among the most vocal critics of the way the Obama administration handled an incident in the first weeks of 2016 in which Iranian forces detained the crews of two small U. S. Navy riverine boats after they drifted into Iranian territorial waters. The Americans were held for 16 hours by Iranian military officials, who filmed them and used the footage for propaganda purposes. The Obama administration downplayed the incident, applauding the communication channels it forged through the nuclear agreement for allowing a peaceful conclusion.
Trump, however, said in September that under his presidency any Iranian ships that conduct similar activities "will be shot out of the water. " Navy officers who have trained for these kinds of scenarios, speaking on the condition of anonymity, say standard rules of engagement are unclear when an enemy force does not pose an immediate lethal threat. For commanders, the top priority for politically charged situations like these after establishing nobody will be harmed is to avoid escalation.
A defense official familiar with U. S. Navy operations in the middle East says as of this week the rules of engagement have not changed.
Trump has, however, wielded new, if incremental, economic weapons against Iran in the form of more sanctions, which the White House says were prepared by the Obama administration. These represent the first step in what will likely be a series of escalator moves "up the spectrum of violence, " says Stavridis, now dean of Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, citing the broad swath of concerns the U. S. has with Tehran's activities in the region.
The sanctions, an initial salvo against Iran, centered on its ballistic missile program as well as its support for terrorist groups throughout the Middle East, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and the deployment of its zealous Quds Force to conflicts against the Islamic State group.
But the most grievous concerns posed by this White House center on Iran's potential for violating the agreement it signed with the Obama administration to rein in its nuclear ambitions.
Confusion over putting Iran "on notice" began with an unusual statement made by Flynn, the retired three-star general and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who during a regular White House press briefing on Wednesday took the podium for less than two minutes to catalog Iran's malign activities and repeat criticism of the Obama administration's entreaties to Tehran.
"Instead of being thankful to the united states for these agreements, Iran is now feeling emboldened. As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice, " Flynn said, before abruptly leaving the room.
When asked about the statement the following day, spokesman Sean Spicer said Flynn was "really clear. "
"We will have further updates for you on those additional actions, but clearly we wanted to make sure that Iran understood that they are on notice, this is not going un-responded to, " Spicer said.
It's also possible the Trump administration plans to strike back against Iranian operations in the middle East, perhaps in Yemen, where Houthi rebels backed by Tehran continue to fight against forces loyal to the internationally recognized government. The U. S. has provided limited support in the form of intelligence and air-refueling capabilities to the Saudi military fighting on behalf of Yemen's government, though that support has diminished in recent months over concerns about Saudi human rights abuses in its bombing campaign.
Last week, the U. S. deployed the USS Cole to the waters off Yemen's shores, following a suicide attack on a Saudi ship that some analysts speculated may have been intended for an American vessel. Navy officials say the Cole was deployed because it happened to be the nearest vessel, though the choice has raised concerns that the ship, which was attacked in an al-Qaida suicide mission in 2000 while it was refueling at Yemen's Aden harbor, could become a symbolic target.
"It's pretty risky for the Cole because the rebels in Yemen have access to ship-killing coastal missiles and used them against our Emirati allies, " says Christopher Swift, a former official in the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control who now teaches national security studies at Georgetown University. "And we have really bad intelligence on Yemen right now as to the emplacement of those missile batteries. "
If the administration believes the latest round of sanctions puts Iran on notice, that would only serve as a marginal and incremental change to Obama's strategy against Iran, Swift says. Deploying the Cole could be a marked shift.
"Quite honestly, that's the thing that has me a little more worried right now, " he says.
The president himself has subsequently employed the phrase "on notice" as a term of art, adding in a subsequent tweet that Iran is now "formally PUT ON NOTICE" for its ballistic missile test at the end of January. Tehran "should have been thankful for the terrible deal the U. S. made with them! " the president added, citing the agreement the Obama administration secured to rein in Iran's nuclear program, which Trump has repeatedly pledged to repeal.
Speaking on Saturday during an official trip to Japan, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who as a Marine general overseeing Middle East wars routinely aired his concerns about Iranian activity, explained that the phrase will "make certain that Iran recognizes that what it is doing is getting the attention of a lot of people, and we have responsibility, along with the rest of the nations that want to maintain stability, to be absolutely clear with Iran in this regard. "
Iranian officials say they do not believe the missile launches violate any U. N. Security Council resolutions because the tests do not involve nuclear warheads. And they are incensed by Flynn and Trump's stated intentions to crack down militarily on Iran.
"We will not take permission from any country or international organization to develop our conventional defense power and we will confront any foreign interference in the defense affairs, including the Islamic Republic of Iran's missile power, " Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said on Monday according to its state news service Fars.
Gen. Hossein Dehqan, Iran's defense minister, said "we don't allow any foreign party to interfere in our defense affairs. "
Fars published a separate op-ed confirming Trump's assertion that Iran has "total disregard" for the U. S. because, according to the news service, "the U. S. has historically earned it. " It advised the Trump administration to "begin to redeem itself. ".