President Donald Trump has threatened to obliterate Iranian power plants and other civilian objects should Iran refuse to open the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, for its part, threatens to respond in kind. Israel attacks “regime infrastructure” in Iran on a daily basis. Iran launches, “in response,” ballistic missiles toward civilian areas in Israel and in Gulf States. And the cycle continues.
If we were to put this into a legal framework, one might think that all parties are engaging in actions that are tantamount to reprisals. Reprisals, in the narrow legal sense, are counter-violations of the law meant to induce the other party to comply with its own legal obligations. Reprisals of this type have a long history in international law. The notion exists on the level of jus ad bellum (the law on resort to war), but has been clearly outlawed with the prohibition on non-defensive force and punitive wars, as entrenched in the UN Charter. On the level of jus in bello, international humanitarian law has gradually narrowed down the scope of permitted reprisals, to the point where they are arguably prohibited altogether. In this piece, however, I do not discuss reprisals in this narrow sense, or focus on their legality. It should be emphasized that no party in the war actually made a case that it engages in “reprisals” in the legal sense. Crucially, they are not even claiming that they are acting to counter violations of the law. Rather, they aim to coerce one another regardless of issues of legality.
For this reason, I use the term “reprisals” as an analytical model of coercive signaling, rather than as a doctrinal legal category, and argue that reprisals are highly unlikely to work in the majority of wartime scenarios. The reason is that there is an acute paradox in the underlying structure of reprisals. Simply put, reprisals require trust, precisely between parties that fundamentally do not trust each other. For this reason, the fact that international law prohibits reprisals is not only justified morally, but also makes sense on the practical level: rather than inducing the other party to cease problematic behavior, they are much more likely to cause uncontrollable escalation.
Counterintuitively, a reprisal in any form requires that opposing parties have a shared perception of reality. Specifically, it requires a common understanding of the causal chain of events, as well as a belief that the adversary’s use of force is genuinely and strictly intended to induce a change in the identified behavior. At its most basic level, a reprisal is a form of communication. As a communicative signal, a reprisal must convince the opponent that three things are true: (a) you, the opponent, have done X; (b) because you have done so, I will do Y to you; (c) I will stop doing Y should you stop doing X. Now, this signal could have been fairly easy to communicate credibly between generals commanding professional armies, engaging in limited warfare, and willing to acknowledge the other’s equal rational agency. However, this is less the case in conditions of noisy communication – as is often the case today – and where parties view the other as inherently evil and fundamentally different from themselves. Furthermore, in modern wars, there is often an assumption that the effectiveness of reprisals lies in their capacity to pressure the broader public to act, so that it, in turn, forces its leadership to cease the unwanted behavior. This requires another condition (d): that the signal is communicated effectively to the opponent’s public, and that not only the leadership, but also the public, believes (a), (b), and (c). Plus the assumption that the public can shape leaders’ warfighting decisions in real time.
Quite clearly, these conditions cannot be fulfilled, at least in relation to Iran and Israel, and quite possibly among other involved States. Importantly, the argument here does not depend on accepting any of these narratives as true. The key point is that once these narratives are in place, reprisals simply cannot work. First of all, in all likelihood, Iran does not accept that its actions in Hormuz are anything but responsive to previous acts by the United States and Israel themselves, so in its view, the reprisal cycle has begun earlier. What the United States is portraying as point (a) (i.e., the closure of Hormuz), Iran perceives as its own act (b) (taken in response to attacks against it). So Iranian belief in point (a) cannot exist. Furthermore, Iran does not believe that the force used against it is causally linked to the behavior identified in the U.S. threat to attack its power plants, as required by (b). Whether because of the unclear objectives of the war, Trump’s erratic behavior, Netanyahu’s character, the history between the parties, or any other reason, Iran likely feels that the attacks against it are unrelated to its actual conduct, or at least the conduct stated as a reason for them. For the same reason, condition (c) cannot be fulfilled: Iran probably believes that it would eventually be attacked in such a way regardless of what it does, or at least as long as the regime continues to stand (which to the regime’s elites is existential). Furthermore, the signal in condition (d) probably cannot be communicated effectively, because of the tight control over information in Iran, internet blackout, and regime propaganda. This, in addition to those in Iran that genuinely share the regime’s ideology and are thus more inclined to share its views regarding (a), (b) and (c).
Israel is a mirror image of these assumptions. Israel does not accept that it is acting in the manner characterized by Iran in relation to point (a); rather, it feels that it is responding to Iran’s “ongoing hostilities” against it, whether these are conducted directly or indirectly. Owing to the annihilationist discourse of the Iranian regime against Israel, Israel likely does not think that the way Iran uses force against it is related in any way to Israel’s own actions, in relation to point (b); and it certainly does not believe that Iran would stop attacking certain targets if Israel does not do so, eroding point (c). And last, Iran’s arguments about retaliation are certainly not communicated effectively or credibly to the Israeli public. There is absolutely no perception in Israel that this or that missile attack can be traced to this or that previous Israeli attack. Thus condition (d) likely does not exist either. In fact, both in Iran and Israel, it is close to impossible – except in the very broad sense – for the public to connect between a supposed “retaliation” to a specific previous behavior by their State.
The idea of reprisals seems to rest on an archetypical picture of opposing generals, meeting under a flag of truce and duly communicating their demands. This, however, does not reflect the information environment of modern wars, and specifically those which are based on the perception of an enemy that has to be eliminated as a political entity altogether. Indeed, it is plain to see that the level of mutual trust required between the adversaries for reprisals to work is staggering. And the paradox is that if such a level of trust could be achieved, the parties would likely not be engaged in this kind of war in the first place.
