MESOPOTAMIA NEWS TODAYS BACKGROUNDER :  Iran Is Gambling That Trump Is Afraid of War

In response to devastating US sanctions, Iran is choosing confrontation over surrender. – By Tony KaronTwitter – July 25, 2019 – THE NATION

What’s the point of having the world’s most powerful military if we never use it, then–Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is said to have shouted at Gen. Colin Powell in 1992, over his reluctance to commit American force to the Balkan wars. President Donald Trump clearly agrees with Albright that the military is there to be used, but also with Powell that it should be kept out of quagmires in harm’s way. He has wielded the US military as a political prop—at the border, in symbolic air strikes against forewarned Syrian targets, and in a July 4 DC extravaganza. But, despite his bellicose tweeting, Trump has declined every chance for expeditionary adventurism.

That’s because a key pillar of the president’s “Make America Great Again” promise has been to reverse the interventionist legacy of President George W. Bush. “We’re charting a path to stability and peace in the Middle East, because great nations do not want to fight endless wars,” Trump reiterated at his 2020 campaign launch in Orlando last month, in language that could have just as easily come from Barack Obama. “They’ve been going on forever,” he added, promising that he was removing troops and “finally putting America first.”

Even as Trump was considering a wrist-slap air strike on Iran following its downing of a US Navy surveillance drone, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson warned him on air against being drawn into the vortex of a military confrontation with Tehran. Trump stood down (except, of course, on Twitter), and Iran saw its strategic reading vindicated: Trump wants to avoid going to war with a country three times the size of Iraq and with far better capacity to hit back.

Although the US Navy later downed an Iranian drone during a confrontation in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has continued to up the ante in that strategically vital oil shipment passageway, most recently by seizing a British tanker in response to the UK’s earlier interdiction of an Iranian tanker off Gibraltar. As the International Crisis Group’s Ali Vaez told The Wall Street Journal, “The reality is that [Trump’s] maximum pressure [strategy] has rendered Tehran more, not less, reckless.”

A year ago, Trump tore up the international nuclear deal (JCPOA) and used US dominance of the international financial system to bully third parties into participating in a new sanctions regime, thereby preventing them from honoring their obligations under the nuclear deal and removing the incentives that had kept Iran compliant. Trump was persuaded by his Saudi and Israeli allies and their DC echo chambers to put Iran’s economy into a stranglehold unless it surrendered to US terms that went far beyond the nuclear deal.

It was an all-or-nothing gamble, conceived by a regime-change faction more alarmed by how the deal treated Iran as a legitimate partner than by anything happening in its nuclear program. More sober analysts warned that Iran would not capitulate, and would choose confrontation over surrender or the slow death of its economy. It’s certainly clear, now, that Iran is willing to take risks in pursuit of ending the US economic siege.

Iran is not going to concede, and it’s betting that Trump cannot afford a war. That looks like a smart wager, but one that carries a high risk of miscalculation on either side that could spark a conflagration despite the desire on both sides to avoid one.

Iran followed its downing a US drone in June with the resumption of limited uranium enrichment and threats to shipping. This suggests a willingness of the Islamic Republic to absorb such force as Trump is willing to consider, in the hope that the resultant crisis prompts third parties to break with the US-led sanction regime. Some 20 percent of daily global oil demand passes through the Strait of Hormuz, meaning that any disruption of that shipping lane risks a major spike in global oil prices. As the Brookings Institution’s Suzanne Maloney told The Wall Street Journal, “Provocations in the Gulf help galvanize more effective European diplomacy by raising the costs.”

She added, “They remind Trump of his own domestic interests in avoiding either spikes in the price of oil or another costly, protracted US military intervention in the Middle East as he begins his re-election campaign.”

And precisely because it lacks a plausible end game—the Iranians cannot capitulate and will keep raising the stakes in hopes of forcing the US side back to the table—Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign has, in fact, left the strategic initiative in Tehran’s hands.

As Iran analyst Laura Rozen recently noted, “If the United States expected that a year or so of crippling economic sanctions on Iran following Donald Trump’s exit from the nuclear deal might bring the Iranians to the table ready to yield to the long list of US grievances with the Islamic Republic, Iran has flipped the script, newly shifting its strategy from one of relative restraint to one where the United States and other powers increasingly seem to be responding to Iranian actions.”

There’s no question the collapse of the JCPOA dealt Iran a strategic setback, reversing some of the diplomatic gains Tehran had achieved through the deal, and by extension, through its nuclear work. It has effectively reset the clock, but only by about five years, to a moment when US blunders in the region had exponentially expanded Tehran’s regional influence, and alarm over its growing capacity to build nuclear weapons had brought Western powers to the negotiating table with a regime most had preferred to see isolated or destroyed.

Iran’s nuclear activities fit the pattern of post-Hiroshima global statecraft: Nuclear weapons have never been an end in themselves; instead they provide the ultimate deterrent. US politicians from Trump to Hillary Clinton casually threaten to “obliterate” Iran, a nod to US nuclear capability. Iran knows that no power can seriously contemplate an existential attack on a regime capable of responding in kind.

The attraction of a nuclear deterrent for any regime with more powerful enemies is obvious. “The Iranians had good reason to acquire nuclear weapons long before the present crisis, and there is substantial evidence they were doing just that in the early 2000s,” realist US foreign policy scholar John Mearsheimer wrote recently in The New York Times. “The case for going nuclear is much more compelling today. After all, Iran now faces an existential threat from the United States, and a nuclear arsenal will go a long way toward eliminating it.”

 

While it may have been birthed in a chaotic revolution 40 years ago, historical circumstances have made regime-survival rather than the export of revolution the Islamic Republic’s top priority. No question, Iran “exports” its political and military influence, but those exports have for decades been shaped by a certain realpolitik. Iran had no ideological reason to expend considerable blood and treasure propping up Syria’s Assad regime, built on a militantly secular alliance of the religiously heterodox Alawite community, Syria’s Christians and other non-Muslim minorities, and the Sunni Muslim bourgeoisie. Iran saved Assad to preserve the land bridge that makes it possible to directly supply weapons to Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement. This access allows Iran’s proxies to target Tel Aviv with Iranian missiles and to hold their own against Israeli ground invasions. For Tehran, Hezbollah’s substantial independent military capability serves a key asymmetrical deterrent against any Israeli or US strikes on Iran.

Iran’s regional military-political reach had expanded considerably in the decade preceding the JCPOA, principally because of the catastrophic blundering of the Bush administration. In Afghanistan and then Iraq, the United States eliminated Iran’s most threatening neighbors (the Taliban and Saddam Hussein), and then for good measure, goaded Israel into a ground invasion of Lebanon in 2006 in the hopes of eliminating Hezbollah—a military catastrophe that killed hundreds of Lebanese and left Hezbollah stronger than ever. Democracy in Iraq brought further gains as the electoral process repeatedly returned governments that put Baghdad within Iran’s sphere of influence.

Tehran appears to have begun research efforts into nuclear weapons—clerical prohibitions notwithstanding—in the early 2000s, in response to the nuclear program of its mortal enemy, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who had attacked Iran in 1980 launching a brutal eight-year war financed by the Saudis. Inspections following Operation Desert Storm in 1991 revealed a robust and sophisticated underground program that had brought Hussein perilously close to achieving nuclear-weapons capability.

And on Iran’s eastern flank, Saudi client-state Pakistan had nukes, as did Iran’s key regional rival Israel, and of course, the United States did too. Ideology aside, there is a compelling incentive to obtain nuclear weapons. The “untouchable” status afforded all nuclear-armed regimes would certainly have its appeal in Tehran.

But in its dealing with world powers, the Iranians were clearly open to other routes to take regime change off the table. In 2003, Tehran reached out to the Bush administration to offer talks in pursuit of a grand bargain that would address all US concerns about Iran, in exchange for normalizing relations. The administration, giddy with the illusion of victory in Iraq and the belief that Tehran had been intimidated by the American show of force, ignored the offer.

The Europeans continued to negotiate with Iran, hoping that offers of economic incentives could stop Iran from enriching its own uranium—which Iran is entitled to do under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The Europeans couldn’t get Bush on board, and therefore couldn’t take regime change off the table. And after two years of restraint, Iran turned on its centrifuges, realizing the leverage obtained by slowly, and legally, expanding the civilian nuclear infrastructure that would enable it, if it wanted, to build weapons. It was this leverage that ultimately compelled world powers to negotiate.

And so Iran achieved a diplomatic innovation: It never actually began to build a nuclear weapon, but it demonstrated sufficient proof of its ability to do that it was able to accrue many of the gains that other regimes had won only once they had built and tested atomic bombs. Iran’s capacity to produce bomb materiel compelled the key international powers to recognize a regime that many would have preferred to shun.

It was the JCPOA’s effective negation of a regime-change option that ignited such fierce hostility from Israel and the Saudis. The deal clearly restricted Iran’s nuclear work and blocked pathways to weaponization, but at the expense of normalizing and legitimizing a regional challenger they’d long sought to eliminate.

Sure, the nuclear deal did not deal with many problematic aspects of Iran’s regional activities (much less of its repressive domestic policies, though that’s something international agreements to keep the peace among states almost never do). Iran’s ability to achieve nuclear breakout capacity had created a tactical urgency to conclude a deal limited to nuclear activities, but the underlying strategic assumption was that such a deal could potentially open the way to negotiate Iran’s integration in the regional security arrangements—a grand bargain. That idea is deeply threatening to the Saudis, who since World War II had enjoyed a primacy in US Middle East policy trumped only by Israel.

As Saudi historian Madawi al-Rasheed explained in The New York Times, “Any rapprochement between the United States and Iran—such as the nuclear agreement under President Obama—is viewed with intense suspicion and fear as it threatens the Saudi position as the leading American client in the region.”