President Joe Biden promised last week that he would respond to an Iranian-backed militant group’s drone strike on U.S. troops in Jordan on Jan. 28. And late Friday afternoon, just hours after the remains of the three young American soldiers killed by the drone strike returned to the U.S., Biden announced that he had authorized retaliatory strikes, hitting multiple military command centers and other targets in Iraq and Syria.

The strikes could be seen as a warning sign that the war in the Middle East − and U.S. engagement in it − is now set to rapidly escalate.

But that might not be the case.

The strikes appear to have been carefully measured and proportional in response, explains Gregory Treverton, a national security scholar at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. The U.S. also, importantly, did not strike Iranian soil.

“Overall, it is a calibrated measure that plainly is not going to entirely degrade the military capacity of any of these groups. But it should still have a pretty significant effect and weaken their military capabilities, at least to some extent,” Treverton writes.

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