‘No one wants to escalate things’

The Biden administration hopes that staying quiet about Israel’s retaliation against Iran will allow the dangerous moment to pass without escalating into all-out war.

The instruction from within Washington has been to keep mum about Israel’s Friday strikes on Isfahan, three U.S. officials and an Israeli official said, who further noted Israel had yet to comment on the response and that Iran has downplayed the incident. If the chest-beating ends, they hope, so too might the latest Middle Eastern crisis.

“No one wants to escalate things,” said the Israeli official, who like others was granted anonymity to detail the thinking behind the silent approach.

The messaging strategy is illustrated by who declined to comment on Israel’s Friday strike: spokespeople at the National Security Council, the Israeli embassy in the U.S. and the Israel Defense Forces. The only on-record confirmation that Israel was behind the strike has come from Italy’s foreign minister. Antonio Tajani, who was hosting Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a G7 meeting in Capri, said Friday “the United States were informed [at] the last minute” by Israel that it was about to attack. “But there was no involvement on the part of the United States.”

Blinken later responded: “I’m not going to speak to anything other than to say we were not involved in any offensive operations.”

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby didn’t appear in front of reporters later in the day, though he’s typically ever-present following hinge moments in global crises. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was left to repel question after question from reporters during the daily briefing, insisting she needed to be “mindful” about not commenting on the attack.

“I just don’t have anything to share,” she said.

The possibility remains that President Joe Biden, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or another senior leader will comment in the hours or days ahead. But there are currently no plans in the U.S. or Israel to deliver a major statement.

Iranian media, meanwhile, is touting how the nation’s air defenses overwhelmed the attack, partly by destroying “three small drones,” and that there was no damage to nuclear sites near Isfahan, which is also home to Iran’s fleet of F-14 Tomcat fighter jets. Local reports continue to downplay the attack, with images of calm streets and a return to normality dominating the airwaves.

If the dam of silence holds, it’s possible tensions won’t flood over into more regional fighting.

“This was far from being the ‘devastating’ retaliation promised by so many in the Israeli War Cabinet,” said Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “Iran's swift denial of any attack could well be designed to shut this door, too, but time will tell whether Iran's proxies are folded into that equation.”

A senior unnamed Iranian official told Reuters there were no plans to retaliate, a signal that the back-and-forth strikes could end here.

If that’s the case, Biden may have deftly navigated one of the most precarious crises of his tenure, even if he failed to deter Israel’s initial April 1 attack on senior Iranian military leaders and Iran’s drone and missile assault.

Last week, senior administration officials scrambled to protect Israel against an unprecedented Iranian barrage, revenge for the killing of Iranian paramilitary leaders at a consulate in Syria. Alongside the United Kingdom, France and regional partners, the U.S. and Israel shot down more than 300 drones and missiles, some of them launched directly from Iran for the first time since the regime came to power in 1979.

Israeli leaders felt compelled to retaliate, even though the U.S. officials urged their counterparts to take the win. Israel seems to have charted a middle path: Prove it can target key parts of Iran’s nuclear program and evade air defenses — but not go so far as to encourage another response from the regime.

“The affair seems contained for the time being,” said Shalom Lipner, who served in the governments of seven consecutive Israeli prime ministers. “Neither party was interested in a full-blown war.”

While most of the officials POLITICO talked to stressed their relief that the attack was relatively limited, one expressed frustration that Israel didn’t heed Biden’s warnings to exercise more restraint and not counterattack.

“The U.S. begged [Israel] not to do it, and literally no one from the Pentagon to the Joint Chiefs to the CIA to the intel community thinks this is a good thing,” said one of the U.S. officials. “At this point, it’s truly embarrassing how much Israel does not listen to us, but yet this doesn’t keep President Biden from blind fealty.”

“Israel is playing a dangerous game, and it feels like Biden is putting us in the crosshairs,” the official continued, reflecting anger expressed in other parts of the administration about the president’s Middle East policy.

There are still plenty of opportunities to rekindle the flame that could set the region on fire.

Iranian proxies could resume attacks on American forces in Iraq and Syria or seize container ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon could launch more missiles into northern Israel. And the Houthis in Yemen, pumped full of weapons by Tehran, could target more commercial ships traversing the Red Sea.

Then there’s the continuing Israeli war with Iran-supported Hamas in Gaza, where the bombs have quieted, but a humanitarian crisis persists. Senior U.S. and Israeli officials held a virtual call Thursday to discuss how to eliminate Hamas’ remaining 3,000 militants in Rafah without endangering the 1.4 million Palestinians there.

Both sides are still far apart on what it would take to protect civilians ahead of a treacherous military operation that Israel has vowed to execute.

“U.S. participants expressed concerns with various courses of action in Rafah, and Israeli participants agreed to take these concerns into account,” read a White House summary of the talks.