Strategic patience is the term John Kiriakou uses for a state that answers an attack with a response deliberately calibrated to fall below the level of the provocation — enough to satisfy domestic opinion, not enough to escalate.
Iran
His primary case is Iran’s response to Israeli strikes on its military sites. Because of public opinion, he says, the Iranians had to respond; what they did was send six or seven hundred slow-moving drones, and telephone the Israelis through the Jordanians beforehand to say that this was what was coming, “just so that they don’t raise the stakes.” The Iron Dome shot almost all of them down.[1]
Kiriakou’s summary of the pattern is that the Iranian response was always far less than the Israeli action that required it, and that the Iranians “really really hoped that this would just go away.”[2]
India
He applies the same admiration to India. Describing a round of India–Pakistan fighting, he says Washington expected the Indians to strike back and they did not — and that observers were saying the Indians were exhibiting “a very mature foreign policy here.” That restraint, in his account, is what kept the exchange from becoming something far worse.[3][4]
The implicit contrast in both cases is with the side that escalates. Where Iran’s restraint failed, in Kiriakou’s telling, was not in Tehran: the Israelis attacked again, and when the Iranian government did not collapse after the American strike, Israel pressed for a larger war.[5]
The response that surprised the world
Reviewing the exchange months afterwards, Kiriakou described the Iranian response as the clearest case of the doctrine he has: “the Iranians have exercised something that everybody’s calling strategic patience. Honest to God, when the Israelis first began attacking Iran, I think the whole world was surprised at how patient the Iranian government took its response — to the point where the Iranian people were in the streets demanding that the government respond.”[6] His assessment of it is unqualified: “I think that the Iranian government did everything right in the way it responded to these Israeli attacks.”[7]
He expects the same posture to be tested again. Anticipating a further Israeli attack — preceded, he predicts, by propaganda that Iran has restarted its nuclear programme, begun rebuilding sites, or taken delivery of “gyroscopes or whatever” — he judges that the Iranians “probably either will not strike back, or will do something symbolic like drones again. And I think that is really the way to go.”[8][9]