Iran: Mother Of All Wars Or Mother Of All Peace?

Acrimony amongst major powers casts a long shadow over the near east. Saudi Arabia claimed that armed drones struck two of its oil pumping stations on Tuesday, two days after the suspected sabotage of its oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates. The United States has braced for “possible imminent threats” to American personnel from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria, but no credible threats have been found by US intelligence agencies. Since early this month, Washington has tried to cut Iranian oil exports down to zero and beef up its military presence in the Persian Gulf, but so far, Iran has been resilient. On Tuesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif met with his Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj in New Delhi, but India has agreed to stop buying Iranian oil on the backdrop of renewed American sanctions. Last weekend, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called on all political factions to come together in the face of unprecedented American pressure. Rouhani’s call for unity soon followed with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s trips to Europe and Russia. European leaders have urged the United States to use maximum restraint and avoid a military confrontation with Iran. However, Washington deployed more assets to the Persian Gulf including a carrier strike group with B-52 bombers. Besides withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Trump Administration also carried out other policies that are very unpopular in the region. In late 2017, the United States recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and just two months ago, Washington signed a declaration recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Iran does not want a confrontation with the United States, nor is it interested in escalating tensions. In Washington, we always perceive Iran’s influence in the near east as “malign” and “destabilizing”, but in this case, the Trump Administration might be spurring trouble here, especially from the likes of National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In fact, a top British general in the Anti-ISIS Coalition at the Pentagon found no credible threats to American forces by Iran in Iraq and Syria despite such claims by the Administration. There are some people in the beltway who would like Iran to come to the negotiating table or reduce Tehran’s influence in the region, but of course, this is very unlikely to happen. The other reason why the Trump Administration is boosting its maximum pressure campaign on Iran is because the president is trying to mobilize his political base for the upcoming 2020 elections. However, Trump’s political base does not favor forever wars like those in Afghanistan and Iraq, and of course, another conflict in the near east would distract the president from his domestic troubles at home, even though his poll numbers have slightly increased than in the past.

President Trump ran on a campaign promise to stay out of forever wars, especially those in the near east, and he may have this general inclination. However, the president is mainly responsible for appointing hawkish officials like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo who replaced people like H.R McMaster and Rex Tillerson in the National Security Agency and the Department of State respectively. This current situation with Iran is very similar to the Iraq fiasco in 2003 where intelligence can be exaggerated to a claim like Iraq storing weapons of mass destruction. Even if Iran were to retaliate in some sort of way in trigger areas like the Persian Gulf or the Bab-al-Mandeb, the United States withdrew from the JCPOA first and continues to strangle the Islamic Republic’s economy by re-imposing sanctions and cutting its oil exports down to zero. In this case, the American public might be extremely skeptical of a conflict with Iran just like they were skeptical about the war in Iraq in 2003. Iran could also be a more formidable adversary than that of Saddam’s Iraq because Iran is a sovereign country with a strong military and a stable political structure. In fact, Iran is not Afghanistan or Iraq (both countries the US invaded in 2002 and 2003) and the Islamic Republic has a population of 80 million that is much larger than both countries combined.

After the United States withdrew from the JCPOA, Washington re-imposed sanctions on the Islamic Republic and have taken quite substantive steps to try to reduce Iran’s oil exports to zero. In addition, the Trump Administration imposed a travel ban on the country, designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, and provided some of its partners in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) with massive amounts of cash, weapons, and political support. As a result of these provocative actions, the Iranians have finally realized that patience might be running out and they would have to retaliate at some point if tensions in the region further escalate. The JCPOA was supposed to be a win-win agreement in terms of lifting sanctions on the Islamic Republic to provide them benefits for abiding by the agreement in exchange for restricting Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The leadership in Tehran has now accepted that the status quo is unsustainable, and they have threatened to potentially violate some sections of the JCPOA in order to send a signal to Washington that their maximum pressure campaign will not work. In addition, more pressure will also be put on the Europeans to step up because so far as Iran is concerned, the Europeans are worried about paying a price for violating U.S sanctions and moving away from the American market. The probability of such a confrontation between Iran and the United States remains highly unlikely, and as mentioned earlier, a misunderstanding or a miscalculation in the region could convince the president to take retaliatory action against Iran, while Iran can retaliate back, and this is extremely dangerous.

When President Trump made his first state visit to Saudi Arabia, he created a foundational axis between the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to contain Iranian ambitions in the near east and collapse the government to the point where Iran does not pose a challenge to American hegemony in the region. The Bolton-Pompeo axis within the Trump Administration would like to see an implosion economically and politically inside Iran that could lead to the overthrow of the Islamic Republic. Unfortunately for people who support this policy, this is more of an illusion than reality and it is very difficult to see how economic sanctions, combined with maximum pressure will lead to the disintegration of the current Iranian government.

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