Between Intent and Capability: Assessing the Lack of Iranian Attacks on the U.S. Homeland

Three days into the war, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said the quiet part out loud: it had long carried out terrorist plots around the world and now intended to deploy those capabilities against the U.S. homeland. And yet, as of this writing, two months after that threat, authorities have yet to report a single homeland plot specifically tied to Iran. Lone offenders appear to have carried out attacks on their own, some clearly angered by the war, but authorities have yet to establish links between these plots and Iranian intelligence or security agencies, their terrorist proxies, or criminals hired as cutouts to carry out attacks. This is surprising, not only because of the explicit threat to target the homeland, but because Iranian-linked plots have been thwarted elsewhere around the world since the war began, and because Iran has a track record of plotting attacks in the United States. Indeed, Iran and its proxies have spent years investing in what U.S. counterterrorism officials describe as a “homeland option” in the United States. Intent and capability, two factors typically associated with assessing threats, could help explain why...

Read the full article on the War on the Rocks website.