Besides arming terrorist groups like Hamas and Hizballah to make war in the Middle East, Iran has long had a strategy of arranging terrorist attacks in far away places. These include the murderous attack on the Buenos Aires Jewish center in 1994, as well as the 2012 bus bombing in Bulgaria that killed five Israeli tourists and one Bulgarian, and countless foiled attacks. And Jews aren’t the only target: Iran has tried to assassinate a Saudi ambassador in Washington, DC, the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and numerous Iranian dissidents living abroad. To do so, it has taken to hiring criminals. Greg Miller, Souad Mekhennet, and Cate Brown report:

In recent years, Iran has outsourced lethal operations and abductions to Hells Angels biker gangs, a notorious Russian mob network known as “Thieves in Law,” a heroin distribution syndicate led by an Iranian narco-trafficker, and violent criminal groups from Scandinavia to South America.

With hit men it has hired in the criminal underworld, Iran has commissioned plots against a former Iranian military officer living under an assumed identity in Maryland, an exiled Iranian American journalist in Brooklyn, a women’s-rights activist in Switzerland, LGBTQ+ activists in Germany, and at least five journalists at Iran International, as well as dissidents and regime critics in a half dozen other countries, according to interviews and records.

Iran’s turn to criminal proxies has in part been driven by necessity, officials said, reflecting the intense scrutiny that Iran’s own operatives face from Western governments.

In [one] plot, Iran used a German member of the [Hells Angels], Ramin Yektaparast, who had fled to Tehran to escape murder charges, to orchestrate the bombing of a synagogue in Essen. An alleged associate balked at bombing the synagogue but fired shots into its windows.

Yesterday I saw an unconfirmed report that the Biden administration has offered Israel a massive arms deal in exchange for a promise not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Even if the report is incorrect, there is plenty of other evidence that the White House has been trying to dissuade Jerusalem from mounting such an attack. The thinking behind this pressure is hard to fathom, as there is little Israel could do that would better serve American interests in the Middle East than putting some distance between the ayatollahs and nuclear weapons. Aaron MacLean explains why this is so, in the context of a broader discussion of strategic priorities in the Middle East and elsewhere:

If the Iran issue were satisfactorily adjusted in the direction of the American interest, the question of Israel’s security would become more manageable overnight. If a network of American partners enjoyed security against state predation, the proactive suppression of militarily less serious threats like Islamic State would be more easily organized—and indeed, such partners would be less vulnerable to the manipulation of powers external to the region.

[The Biden administration’s] commitment to escalation avoidance has had the odd effect of making the security situation in the region look a great deal as it would if America had actually withdrawn [from the Middle East].

Alternatively, we could project competence by effectively backing our Middle East partners in their competitions against their enemies, who are also our enemies, by ensuring a favorable overall balance of power in the region by means of our partnership network, and by preventing Iran from achieving nuclear status—even if it courts escalation with Iran in the shorter run.