President Joe Biden “will respond decisively” to the Iran-backed attack that killed three U.S. troops in Jordan on Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday.

“We will hold responsible the people who attacked our troops,” Blinken told reporters. “We’ll do so at a time and a place of our choosing. At the same time, we remain focused on our core objectives in the region, both in terms of the conflict in Gaza and broader efforts to build truly durable peace and security.”

An Iran-backed military group killed three Army Reserve soldiers and wounded dozens of Americans in a one-way attack drone strike on a small outpost near the border of Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. The strike has raised the stakes of a tit-for-tat crisis that has intensified in the months since the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7 that ignited Israel’s war in Gaza, forcing U.S. officials to contemplate a regional scenario that Blinken regards as the most “dangerous” of Biden’s long career.

“This is an incredibly volatile time in the Middle East,” Blinken said. “I would argue that we’ve not seen a situation as dangerous as the one we’re facing now across the region since at least 1973 and, arguably, even before that. And that is the environment in which we’re operating.”

Biden was first sworn into office as a senator in 1973, a year remembered for the Yom Kippur War that erupted on Oct. 6. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a pair of Gaza-based organizations beholden to Tehran, conducted their rampage across southern Israel almost exactly 50 years after the outbreak of that war — and only about a week after one of Blinken’s colleagues asserted that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” as White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan put it.

“This is a reminder to all U.S. policymakers past, present and future: The Middle East is not a region to stake large grand claims on; it can turn on a dime,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Behnam Ben Taleblu told the Washington Examiner. “It would be helpful for U.S. policy to take that into account.”

U.S. officials have tried, in the subsequent months, to mitigate the risk that Iran or its leading proxies would intervene against Israel on behalf of Hamas. As it stands, Lebanese Hezbollah has avoided a major clash with the Israel Defense Forces, but Iran’s other proxy, the Yemen-based Houthis, have launched numerous attacks on commercial ships trying to pass through the Red Sea to the Mediterranean in an apparent effort to raise the global economic cost of the conflict and with it the international pressure for Israel to halt its campaign against Hamas. In parallel, Iranian proxies in Iraq and Syria have targeted U.S. troops deployed as part of the international anti-ISIS coalition.

That posture has drawn sharp criticism from Republicans who believe that Biden’s desire to avoid escalation has proven tempting for Iran.

“Joe Biden emboldened Iran for years by tolerating attacks on our troops,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Sunday. “The only answer to these attacks must be devastating military retaliation against Iran’s terrorist forces, both in Iran and across the Middle East. Anything less will confirm Joe Biden as a coward unworthy of being commander in chief.”

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Biden’s administration has signaled its preference for a more limited response. Blinken implied that Biden would opt for a blend of measures that might be “sustained over time,” regardless of how they appear at first.

“I’m certainly not going to telegraph the response,” he said. “But as I mentioned, that response could well be multileveled, it could come in stages, and it could be sustained over time.”