U.S. forces are in the midst of a multi-pronged attack against Iranian targets in Syria and Iraq.

This attack, among the most telegraphed in recent memory, comes days after three soldiers, Sergeant Kennedy Sanders, William Rivers, and Breonna Moffett, were killed in a drone attack at a border post in Jordan.

The Middle East was already boiling and President Biden seems loath to escalate, but he also felt that he had no choice.

Will this attack successfully dissuade Iran and its militias from targeting U.S. forces?

Joining me to discuss this tonight, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, Susan Glasser is a staff writer for The New Yorker, Lara Seligman is a defense reporter for Politico, and Nancy Youssef is the national security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

And I should note at the outset that Peter and Susan are married, which all of you at home know because you've all read their books, which they write together, which are excellent.

Nancy, let me start with you.

Just give us the latest on these retaliatory strikes.

Where are we right now?

NANCY YOUSSEF, National Security Correspondent, The Wall Street Journal: So, just a few hours ago, the United States launched a series of strikes on seven locations using 125 precision munitions, hitting 85 targets.

And this was their response to the death of those three service members that you mentioned on Sunday.

There were a couple of things that were different this time from some of the past strikes we've seen from the United States.

One, they were targeting Iranian paramilitary forces and we heard some more about strikes -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: As opposed to non-Iranian militia?

NANCY YOUSSEF: That's right.

That's right, that they were mentioning that they were going after Iranian paramilitary forces.

And we heard a little bit about their targets, and it's clear that based on the list we have so far, that they were going for logistics, essentially supplies provided by Iran to Iraq and Syria, in an effort to take away from their capability to do future strikes.

Where before we heard about warehouses, it seemed that they went a little - - they escalated in terms of the targeting, maybe command and control centers, where the computers were, where some of the planning might have happened, more advanced targeting of the kinds of capabilities that they need to do the kinds of strikes that they've launched against U.S. forces.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Lara, let me ask you this, because you were just at the Pentagon.

What do they think?

What do the United States military think it's achieving right now?

LARA SELIGMAN, Defense Reporter, Politico: Well, I think that a lot of what's achieving is symbolism.

I think that the president really telegraphed this week that there was going to be a response, that there was going to be a multi-tiered response, and this is really the first phase of that.

So, I think the symbolism is really big here.

They used long-range bombers that they flew from the United States.

They used the bombers when they want to send a signal of force.

I think they also are signaling that President Biden isn't going to stop, and I think there may be additional strikes.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: How many do you -- do you have any sense of how long this is going to go on?

LARA SELIGMAN: My guess is days, probably, I don't think it will be weeks.

And I also don't think that they're going to strike inside Iran.

And I don't think they're going to strike assets that we've heard about like Iranian naval vessels.

I think that would be too much of an escalation.

But it's interesting that they've escalated to the point of actually hitting the Quds Force this time.

That's important.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Tell us what the Quds force is.

LARA SELIGMAN: The Quds Force is this specialized branch of the IRGC, which is the Iranian militia.

It's very specialized in terms of it's the primary group that does covert action outside of Iran.

And, of course, it was, General Soleimani was in charge of the Quds Force for a long time.

He was the man the President Trump killed in a 2020 drone strike, and that led to a lot of tension in the area.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Susan, what would be the consequence of the U.S. actually attacking inside Iran?

SUSAN GLASSER, Staff Writer, The New Yorker: Well, that would certainly define escalation, wouldn't it, Jeff?

I mean, you know, this is something that's been talked about.

What you heard in the immediate aftermath, in fact, of this deadly attack on the U.S. service members the other day, was immediately, you know, the large number of Republican hawks here in Washington demanding exactly that, saying strike them inside Iran, we should do this, do it now, you know, some senators beating their chest saying, you know, hit Tehran.

I think the U.S. military, right, they have a very different approach, which is to calibrate in response to what is the perceived attack that they're reacting to.

And this would be seen, I think, as something really going beyond that.

But here we are instead in this cycle once again.

It must feel so familiar to you as a longtime observer of the region, like, you know, again and again and again.

And, you know, the worry, of course, is that we're really not achieving much of anything at all, simply continuing a really deadly game.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

I want to come back to that question in a minute about what America, or what President Biden thinks he's achieving here.

But, Peter, let me just ask you this, and I recognize that this question is speculative.

You don't have sources to the best of my knowledge in Kata'ib Hezbollah, which is the organization that we know of, the organization that launched the fatal attack.

But there is some talk that they themselves might have been surprised that they killed American soldiers, and that Iran realizes that, whoa, you know, in our little endless game, that Susan is referring to, this went too far.

We didn't actually mean for soldiers to die.

There have been plenty of attacks since October 7th, but this is the first.

PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Exactly, they've had 160, 165 attacks or whatever since October 7th.

None had managed to successfully kill an American up until now because we have actually pretty good air defenses.

We've shot down a lot of stuff.

We have hardened targets.

They're not able to actually get to our folks.

And our people in the administration will say, look, this is not a fundamentally different attack other than the fact that they got lucky.

And they got lucky in a sense that we had an American drone coming back to that outpost in Jordan at the same time.

There's some discussion that perhaps the air defenses got confused and therefore the enemy drone managed to do something that had otherwise -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Their drone was drafting behind the American drone.

PETER BAKER: Exactly.

So, we don't know that they intended to escalate to the point of killing Americans, and that's part of the calculation here.

Does Iran want a wider war?

The intelligence and the administration agencies are saying, no, they don't think they do.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But, Nancy, I want to stay on that for a second, because Kata'ib Hezbollah, all these militias across the Middle East, from the Houthis to Hezbollah, to Hamas in Gaza, have connections to the IRGC and for the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence as well.

But we don't fully understand how much control day-to-day, month-to-month, the Iranian regime has over these groups.

Can you give us any insight about what this group that started this latest round of escalation, what this group was hoping to achieve?

NANCY YOUSSEF: Well, I think broadly what Iran is hoping to achieve is for the United States to leave the Middle East.

That's the overall objective in these strikes and that they're using these proxy groups to do it.

And so what the U.S. is doing in response is they are trying to do one of two things, either to make the cost of trying to drive the U.S. so high that they stop doing these attacks or that they lose the capability to be able to continue to do these strikes.

And I think we're seeing more of the latter, that the U.S. is trying to do enough strikes so that they don't have the capability to continue this campaign in an effort to drive the U.S. out of the Middle East.

And the challenge is by not going after Iranian leadership directly and going after the proxy forces, is that enough for them, because they're not paying the cost in Iran.

It's proxy forces in Syria, in Yemen, in Iraq who are paying the cost for these strikes.

And so what you're seeing the U.S. do is, I think, slowly escalate in terms of the types of strikes that they're doing.

We started with one facility.

We're now at seven.

Going after openly now Iranian paramilitary members in these countries is an effort to take away the capability and hopefully disincentivize.

But in terms of the objective, the objective is to drive the Americans out, to make the cost so high for the Americans that they decide to leave the region.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But, Lara, you're an expert on the American response and the American presence in the Middle East.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this level of attack or retaliatory attack is not going to degrade the Iranian capabilities to any noticeable degree.

Am I wrong?

LARA SELIGMAN: I don't think so.

I think that Iran has many ways of resupplying their proxies in the Middle East in not just Yemen and Iraq and Syria, but all around the world.

I think they have many ways of doing that.

So, I do think that, again, this was more of a symbolic effort than anything else.

I think the idea is to show Iran that we're not going anywhere.

And I think, as Nancy said, that this is one of Iran's goals, is to push the U.S. and pressure us to leave the Middle East.

While at the same time, we also saw this week that Iraq actually started discussions with the U.S. about potentially withdrawing troops.

So, it's a very interesting coincidence that this happened at the same time.

But I don't think -- I think this is now the worst time, and the administration knows that to withdraw troops from either Iraq or Syria.

I think we're going to stay there for the long-term now.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

I want to talk about the contrasting approaches to around Donald Trump's and Joe Biden in a second.

But one of the mysteries, at least to me, about this attack is that it's so foreseen.

I mean, we've been talking about it.

An official Washington has been talking about it for days.

I saw this quote from Nellie Bowles in the Free Press who wrote, it's a funny quote, the key to military strategy is to announce it loudly and clearly a week or two ahead of time.

That's what it said in The Art of War, I'm pretty sure.

I mean, there's a lot of talk about -- well, we spend days basically telling the Iranians, leave those sites.

We spend days telling them, oh, we're not going to hit Iran.

So, at what point does this symbolic gesture become futile?

I mean, what am I missing about the way they're calibrating the way they talk about this in the administration?

SUSAN GLASSER: Yes, calibrating is the right word, Jeff.

I think that's exactly what you're seeing here from the Biden administration.

First of all, let's put on the table the political reality, which I think you have to look at.

Right now, for President Biden embroiled in an existential fight, as he has defined it for American democracy against Donald Trump, the last thing he wants right now is to be engaged in a broader war in the Middle East.

This is, first of all, we can talk about it more, one of Donald Trump's main talking points, right, this idea that he was the guy who somehow withdrew the United States from foreign conflicts and didn't start any new wars.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

But let me just throw something into your mix here.

Donald Trump also is the guy who ordered the killing of Soleimani.

SUSAN GLASSER: Exactly.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, he wants to -- he's in isolationist except when he wants to punch the Iranians.

So -- SUSAN GLASSER: Exactly.

And by the way, you raised the premise, okay, did we lose something by telegraphing so loudly for days and days and days that we were going to take this action?

Recall back to 2016, this was one of Trump's main gripes about the U.S. presence in Syria, that we were too loudly sort of telegraphing what we were planning to do in terms of taking out the Islamic State, which he then promptly took credit for once the operations that had been planned in the previous administration were carried out at the very beginning of his tenure.

But, again, the politics of this, I think, are perceived as quite dangerous and risky for President Biden.

He obviously has a long-term challenge with China on his plate.

He's got the ongoing war in Ukraine that he pledged to support Ukraine for as long as it takes, and yet he's embroiled in a big fight with Congress to get them to step up and follow through on his ask for $60 billion in additional assistance.

He's got a whole world of challenges at a moment in time when Americans are extremely inward-looking and not having the appetite for a broader conflict in the Middle East.