Today, Adel al-Jubeir is Saudi Arabia’s minister of foreign affairs. If Iran had its way, he would be dead. Moreover, Jubeir’s assassination, having occurred on American soil and which would likely have been accompanied by American collateral causalities, could have sparked a war.

Mannsor Arbabsiar, a 58-year-old car salesman from Texas, was the unlikely instrument of Iranian terrorism. In 2011, he was recruited by his cousin, a senior official with Tehran’s Quds Force, to orchestrate a bombing in Washington D.C.’s Cafe Milano where then-Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Jubeir was dining. The operation was thwarted before it could be executed and, with direct links to Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei having been established, the State Department brought the rhetorical hammer down on Iran.

The plot was part of a “marked resurgence of Iran’s state sponsorship of terrorism,” a State Department statement read. “Arbabsiar was an enemy among us,” declared US Attorney Preet Bharara, “the key conduit for, and facilitator of, a nefarious international plot concocted by members of the Iranian military.”

It was an act of war, and representatives of the United States talked about it in terms that were appropriate for such a grave act. A bipartisan group of legislators began calling the plot an attack on the sovereignty of the United States. The White House heaped scorn upon Iran, and the Treasury Department issued a set of targeted sanctions on five individuals linked the plot. Then, nothing.

The Obama administration had higher priorities than preserving the faith of a longtime ally in Saudi Arabia and punishing Iran for what would have been a casus belli had the assassination attempt been successful. Only toward the end of his second term has it become clear that Barack Obama’s goal was always to rehabilitate the Iranian regime so that it could serve as a pillar of stability in the Middle East. No provocation would deter them from pursuing that objective. None, it seems, including further attacks on American interests on U.S. soil.

Barack Obama has been successful in reorienting American diplomatic posture toward Tehran and away from Riyadh, albeit at great expense to regional stability. This shift has not, however, yielded any goodwill from the terror-supporting regime in Tehran. In 2013, a breach in the computer systems of a dam 20 miles north of New York City designed to prevent flooding further down river alarmed investigators. This week, following an extensive investigation, the Department of Justice reportedly prepared an indictment alleging that the Iranian government was behind the hack on an element of American civilian infrastructure.

Following a variety of high-profile, foreign government-directed attacks on U.S. governmental systems, the Obama administration previewed its intention to impose real consequences on states that engage in covert acts of cyber warfare against the United States. On the surface, however, talk is about all that the administration seems prepared to do.

“We’re always concerned when we see nation-state activity probing our infrastructure,” former FBI cyber investigations officer Leo Taddeo told CNN. “By naming and shaming, you might bring attention to the issue and bring additional resources to bear on it.”

This seems a woefully inadequate response to what is essentially an attack on the United States. Clearly, there are fine distinctions between a physical attack and a cyber-attack. The theater of operations in cyberspace is perpetually hot. There are few means of deterrence and identifying hackers and preparing a proportional retaliatory response is difficult. The fact that this, like the massive Chinese-directed hack on the Office of Personnel Management, targeted non-military targets also presents the Obama administration with a narrow set of options when preparing an appropriate reaction. Nevertheless, the information gathered from those security breaches could be used for offensive purposes, and a campaign of “naming and shaming” doesn’t quite convey to the aggressor the seriousness of their transgression.