President Joe Biden is considering how to respond to an Iranian-orchestrated attack last Sunday on a U.S. military outpost in northeastern Jordan. That attack killed three Americans and wounded dozens more, some very seriously. It showed that previous U.S. efforts to deter Iran from using its Iraqi and Syrian proxy militias to carry out attacks have been unsuccessful.

Iran disingenuously assures us it had nothing to do with Sunday’s attack. The reality is that the militia responsible has deep, subordinated ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. This drone attack showed an unusually significant degree of sophistication, further evincing Iranian malfeasance. The United States must ensure that any retaliation alters Iran’s strategic calculus rather than simply the calculus of one or more of the militias it employs.

Up until now, the U.S. has responded to Iranian-aligned militia attacks with limited air strikes. The White House understandably wants to prevent an escalation of the Israel-Hamas war into a regional war. The White House is partly shaping its policy based on what I understand to be significant tensions within both the Iranian government and the Guard over how aggressively Iran should act toward the U.S. While prior failures saw it lose agents inside Iran, the CIA now has a robust agent network providing insight into Iranian government calculations. The Biden administration thus wants to thread the needle between encouraging more hard-liner Iranian elements to believe that the U.S. is timid or conversely taking excessively aggressive action that bolsters those elements in pushing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei toward greater confrontation. The hard-liner faction is dominated by Quds Force Cmdr. Esmail Qaani and MOIS intelligence service chief Esmail Khatib.

It’s important to note here that Iranian officials have also repeatedly stated their reluctance to see a broader war with the U.S. And Iran’s reliance on proxy militias and the Houthis to target U.S.-allied interests also underlines its caution. Put simply, Iran has shown it wants to maximize its damage to U.S. interests without provoking overwhelming U.S. retaliation.

The problem is that the attack in Jordan has proved that Iran clearly believes the U.S. will tolerate at least some American funerals without offering serious riposte. The White House has likely fueled Iran’s risk appetite by its unnecessarily ad nauseam assertions that it does not seek escalation while at the same time making only occasional military responses to Houthi and other militia attacks. The U.S. must therefore educate Iran to a new understanding of American tolerances. Iran must be made to understand that it has crossed a red line and will far more suffer than benefit from any similar attacks in the future.

That takes us back to Iran’s internal political dynamics. Until now, Khamenei’s anti-U.S. strategy has focused on more deniable elements of Iranian power, such as the Quds Force, IRGC-affiliated militias, and the MOIS. Khamenei wants to impose suffering on the U.S., including via high-profile assassination plots in retaliation for the January 2020 U.S. killing of then-Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani. But Khamenei’s reliance on covert or deniable elements also shows his desire to avoid excessive U.S. retaliation.

Sunday’s attack, though, means that Iran’s risk appetite is now intolerable for the U.S. The U.S. must take decisive action to restore deterrent balance. Washington’s challenge rests in taking decisive action that alters Iran’s risk appetite but mitigates the risk of an escalatory spiral.

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius underlines this point, noting that Biden is “likely to take decisive action but think hard about the consequences of the option he chooses.” In detailing the possible consequences of different U.S. actions, however, Ignatius inadvertently underlines the problem with fixating on the process rather than the objective of any military strategy. Namely, that the more one obsesses over calibrating action to reduce escalatory risk, the more one risks any action lacking sufficiently decisive quality. These endless calibrations risk making the U.S. look as if it lacks resolve. Deterrence demands an adversary’s understanding that you are resolved to master any escalation cycle to his excess cost.

In turn, what the U.S. should do is strike the Iranian center of gravity most responsible for what happened on Sunday and for Iran’s broader threats. Khamenei must know his regime cannot hide behind a thin militia veil of deniability as it kills Americans. The U.S. should carry out a small number of intense air strikes against the Guard’s command-and-control nodes and/or drone manufacturing facilities inside Iran. These strikes would constitute a direct response to what occurred on Sunday. Crucially, also, such strikes would broadcast to Tehran the proof of U.S. resolve to take risks to restore deterrence. Iran would see a balance between U.S. resolve (acting inside Iran proper) and a continued U.S. interest in avoiding escalation toward war (acting at a limited scale).

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That said, I think it unlikely that Biden will order strikes inside Iran. More likely, he will strike the Guard’s positions and militia groups across Iraq and Syria. The strategic risk is that such strikes don’t go to the source of the problem and that Khamenei and the hard-liner factions will perceive American action as evincing a strategic weakness veiled behind 2,000-pound bombs. Some analysts believe this risk can be offset by U.S. strikes taking place across a period of days or weeks. That’s also unlikely. The Iranians won’t regard anything other than a strike on their territory as a sign of U.S. resolve. And the Biden administration will fear that public military action of some duration will risk catalyzing the more paranoid elements of the Iranian regime, strengthening their hand against those calling for restraint.

Biden has a tough call to make.