LONDON _ Whether eventually it proves a strategic triumph, disaster or just another bloody chapter in Middle East history, U.S. President Donald Trump's order to kill one of the most senior figures in Iran is exposing the strengths and weaknesses that make the Islamic Republic fight the way it does.
The pinpoint accuracy of Iran's immediate response to the Jan. 3 killing of Al Quds commander Qassem Soleimani, striking two U.S. bases in Iraq while avoiding causing casualties that could have led to war, has clearly signaled Iran's capacity to harm American assets and personnel if it chooses _ as well as the limitations on Iran's freedom to openly do so.
That dilemma in turn appeared to confirm what many military analysts have long assumed: Iran resorts to asymmetric warfare _ the use of unconventional weapons and tactics to take on a far greater military might _ because it cannot afford to provoke a conventional conflict it would lose.
Weaknesses in Iran's regular air, land and sea forces are the result of decades of economic sanctions and constrained budgets, as the U.S., its Sunni gulf allies and Israel sought to isolate and weaken the Shiite Islamist regime from its revolutionary birth in 1979.
Those shortcomings help explain the prominence achieved by Soleimani's Al Quds force, a unit of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that works with a stable of mainly fellow Shiite proxy militias across the region to challenge the U.S. and its allies.
It explains, too, the decision of Iran's leaders to invest in ballistic missiles, submarines and _ most controversially _ a nuclear fuel program that could enable Tehran to build atomic weapons, and has propelled the West's confrontation with the Islamic Republic for much of the past two decades.
The Trump administration is now seeking to rein in all of the asymmetric capabilities Iran has built to compensate for its conventional weakness. Last year, Iran became the first state to have its military forces designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization.
Iran's missile response to Soleimani's killing was an exception, according to Anniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, or RUSI, a London security think-tank.
"What you are likely to see now is a reprisal of low-level conflict," pursued under a cloak of deniability, she said. She recalled a series of attacks on shipping and oil facilities in the gulf last year for which Iran denied responsibility, as well as more far-flung undeclared operations, such as the 2012 suicide bombing of an Israeli tourist bus in Bulgaria.
Washington and Tehran have made it clear that for now they are taking a step back from further military confrontation. But Soleimani's killing _ which followed actions by Iranian proxies in Iraq that killed a U.S. contractor _ will leave leaders in Tehran less certain of where the U.S. threshold for escalation now lies.
