Yesterday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel to continue efforts to secure a hostage-for-ceasefire deal, which were renewed in Qatar on Thursday. The U.S. hopes that securing an agreement can prevent Iran from following through with its threatened retaliatory attacks, and thus prevent a larger, region-wide war. But even if this is correct in the short run, a different American course of action will be necessary. Thus argues Dana Stroul, herself a former Biden administration official:

U.S. and Israeli officials may still believe that neither Iran nor Hizballah seeks full-scale war. Yet both are wrestling with global humiliation in the aftermath of Israel’s strikes; there is a serious risk that their revenge instinct outweighs their pragmatism. If Iran once again ignores international pressure to hold back, it is likely to design a larger response than it carried out on April 13, which could include multiple direct attacks against Israel or coordinated attacks with its proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. There’s also a risk that Iran directs Hizballah to strike first in an attempt to drain Israel’s air defenses before launching a direct attack of its own.

Tehran is most likely to stand down if its leaders perceive the regime’s own security is at risk. President Biden should consider signaling that he is ready to shift the use of American military force from targeting Iran’s proxies to targeting inside Iran, such as weapons storage or production facilities. The additional forces and capabilities he has sent to the region could be used not only to defend Israel after an Iranian attack but also to punish Iran directly.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].