Iran has returned to occupy a prominent position in the map of the political oriental region and on the table of attention to developments in the Middle East and its strategic players. Iran has not been absent from the region's defenses and capabilities, for sure, but has not been seen, throughout its effective presence during the past two decades, as an urgent target for international powers, not even regional rivals, although it has suffered US and international sanctions since the declaration of the Islamic Republic. It can be said that Iran was the regional power that reported, directly or indirectly, and perhaps unintentionally or planning, the overall transformation of the region since the events of September 2001.
The Islamic Republic reported that the Bush administration had overthrown the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001, which had adopted anti-Iranian policies that had reached a sectarian level. It reported from the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime, becoming the largest and most influential force in Iraq, the main Arab state. Israel's successive wars on Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, and the shortsighted US policy of supporting Israel's wars, helped bolster Iran's influence in Lebanon as the main backer of Hezbollah, the only and largest armed force inside Lebanon, and strengthening its ties with Hamas, And Hamas's smaller partners in the Palestinian resistance arena.
When the revolution and change movement broke out in the Arab arena in late 2010, the Iranian model appeared to face an unexpected challenge, after the Arab masses in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen raised slogans of democracy and pluralism, avoided community violence, Ideological dictatorship. But the process of democratic change in the Arab states has stalled. The United States and the counterrevolutionary countries in the Gulf have adopted a policy of indifference to the process of change, or an anti-democratic stance that allowed Iran to exploit the regional strategic climate in the years after 2013.
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Iran encouraged the Assad regime to confront its people with the force of arms. When the regime was unable to quell the Syrian revolution, Iran, directly and using allies in various Shiite militias, advanced to help the regime and establish a deep military and economic presence throughout Syria. The Iranian-Russian understanding in the autumn of 2015, which directly introduced the Russians into Syria's civil war, contributed to strengthening the alliance relations between Moscow and Tehran.
Iran encouraged Maliki's government to crack down on popular sit-ins in Iraq's Sunni majority cities in 2013. When Maliki's forces collapsed in front of the state in the summer of 2014, Tehran made a pragmatic decision to get rid of Maliki and cooperate, over the next years, with US forces to defeat state regulation and put an end to his control. In northern and western Iraq. When the Iranian leadership confirmed the Obama administration's intention to negotiate the nuclear issue, Iran negotiated with the United States to reach a landmark agreement, which opened the way for an end to Iran's international isolation and the elimination of most of the US and international sanctions imposed on it in previous decades.
In Yemen, Saudi Arabia's anti-democratic policies have allowed the Houthis, Iran's close allies, to bring about a coup d'état in the fall of 2014, thereby imposing control over the capital and much of northern Yemen. Despite Saudi Arabia's declared war with the Houthis in the spring of 2015, the Huthis remained conservative and, with Iranian technical assistance, turned into a threat to Saudi internal security. The war in Yemen, whatever the angle of view, has become a source of bitter financial and military drain for Saudi Arabia, Iran's regional adversary.
Against the background of this strategic expansion, it was not surprising that enthusiasm took on a secondary official in Tehran to say that Iran now controls four Arab capitals. Even the siege of Qatar, which the Saudi-UAE-Bahraini trio pledged, which the three countries thought would remain a purely Gulf issue, soon turned into a regional affair that did not benefit Iran. Iran's opposition to the blockade of Qatar, the opening of its airspace to Qatar Airways, and the concern of Kuwait and Oman of Saudi aggression, have created a climate of friendliness between Tehran, Doha, Kuwait and Muscat.
Today, Iran appears to be facing a new strategic climate in the region and its international relations. Not because its regional adversaries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are in a better position, but because there are growing indications that Iran's regional expansion has transcended Iran's own self-sufficiency, a contradiction between Tehran's goals and Moscow's objectives in Syria. Other, the withdrawal from the nuclear agreement, and perhaps in a completely imprecise manner, opened the door to an escalating crisis in the Gulf, of which Iran stands.
Crisis in the Gulf and its vicinity
The United States, with the support of a number of Western European countries, accuses Iran of carrying out attacks on four ships, including two Saudi carriers near the port of Fujairah, on 13 May 2019. The attacks on two carriers belonging to a Norwegian company and another to a Japanese company in the Gulf of Oman On June 13. On both occasions, sophisticated means of detonation have been used, which are unlikely to be possessed or controlled by terrorist groups. The Americans say they have unquestionable intelligence evidence, pointing to Iranian responsibility for the attacks, while Tehran denies responsibility, while other countries, including Russia, demand further investigation before taking charge of Iran.
Iran may appear to be a major beneficiary of the incidents, which carry threatening messages to Iran's regional rivals, the world market and international powers, rather than an attempt to disrupt Gulf navigation or ignite the war. However, whatever side is pushing the region to the edge of the abyss, this situation may serve Tehran's relentless efforts to get rid of the impasse of sanctions and the enormous sanctions imposed by the Trump administration on Iran and on all the companies and countries that can deal with them economically, commercially and financially. Here lies the growing tension in the Gulf and the foundations of the crisis that weighs heavily on its waters and the countries surrounding its coasts.
Committed to the implementation of its electoral promises, Trump announced in May 2018 the withdrawal of the United States from the nuclear agreement reached by the Obama administration with Iran in the summer of 2015 and approved by other permanent members of the Security Council, in addition to Germany. It was then seen by some that Trump's cancellation of the United States' commitment to the agreement was decided to appease Washington's allies in the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia and Israel. But Trump's motives were purely American, not only because he had already announced his intention to withdraw from the agreement during his election campaign, but also because the US political scene had been divided over the agreement from the very beginning and once it was announced, on him.
What prompted America's Middle Eastern allies, perhaps, was to urge the Trump administration to expand the terms it set for restarting negotiations with Iran. While the Obama administration severed the nuclear file and other US-Iranian conflict issues when it began negotiations in 2014, which ended with the summer agreement of 2015, the Trump administration links the call to renegotiate a new agreement and a number of other issues, including Iran's missile program, And Tehran's position on the Palestinian issue and its relations with Palestinian and non-Palestinian armed forces in the Middle East.
Within a short period of the US exit from the nuclear deal, Trump's administration began imposing new sanctions on Iran, not only restoring those that the Obama administration had imposed, but also a series of other harsh sanctions, culminating in May. US sanctions extend the industry and export of Iranian oil, most of the other economic and financial activities, and include the status of the IRGC and a number of its leaders and companies on the terrorism list. Because these sanctions are American, not international, the Trump administration of the sanctions system has planted sharp teeth when it announced that it would impose secondary sanctions on states and companies that break sanctions, especially those that have links to the US market.
The exit of Iranian oil, or most of it from the market, meant a sharp increase in the prices of energy sources, at a time when the world economy is suffering relative stagnation, due to various European tensions and the US-China economic war. But Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer and exporter, has voiced support for the US position on Iran and has promised to compensate for the shortfall caused by a drop in Iranian exports. This is what has already happened. Oil prices have not maintained their levels since May 2019. They have fallen slightly. Prices have not risen slightly, which seems to be temporary, only after the Gulf of Oman attacks on June 13, 2019.
There is no doubt that Trump does not want a war with Iran, or even a limited military confrontation. Trump's calculations have shown that sanctions would have a devastating impact on the Iranian economy, which had not yet recovered when the 2015 agreement was signed, and that sanctions alone would push Iran back to the negotiating table. But the move to cancel the US commitment to the agreement, and the conditions Washington announced for negotiation, was considered insulting in Tehran. The regime's leaders believe that accepting it will create a deep rift in the Iranian regime's vision of itself, in its regional situation, and in the complex of relations of control and sovereignty that binds its people. How, then, will Iran emerge from the impasse, the quagmire of sanctions that began to undermine Iran's economic-financial situation, on the one hand, and the difficulty of accepting the terms of negotiations on the other?
Tehran considered positively the declaration of the European Union, which rejected the US unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear agreement, to work on a new system of economic-financial relations with Iran. But Europe has not yet taken any concrete steps in establishing the alternative system, and there is even doubt about the possibility of such a system. The Europeans also expressed clear opposition to Tehran's announcement to raise the level of uranium enrichment to the level of reactor fuel (not nuclear weapons), which Iran has already begun as another means to pressure international powers to maintain the 2015. Both steps are not enough to open a window in the crisis, The United States and its allies in the region bear Iran's responsibility for the undeclared exposure of shipping in the Gulf.
Americans say they have seen signs of an Iranian escalation in the Gulf, prompting them to mobilize a significant military presence in the region, which is known in the US military as a full aircraft carrier, including a ship to provide emergency health services, as well as two strategic bombers. Then came the Fujairah bombings to provide further justification to strengthen that crowd.
According to the New York Times (June 15, 2019), there was a high-level meeting of defense and foreign officials, already launched in what is known in the Pentagon as Tank, when the report on the attacks in the Gulf of Oman was reported to discuss the request of the Central Command, Middle East, to increase the presence of twenty thousand troops on the forces stationed in the Gulf, to face the potential threats from Iran. In the end, to avoid the impression that the United States was preparing for a war to change the regime in Tehran, an increase of up to a thousand soldiers was approved.
It is not clear that any of the mediators seeking to reduce tension and defuse the crisis in the Gulf have made progress, not those made by Iraqis, Qataris and Japanese, with American demand or approval, nor those that have been volunteered by other parties. In the sense that none of the mediators have yet to find the magic key to remove Iran from the impasse of sanctions and change the terms of the US humiliating negotiations. The crisis is now in the throes of Iran and the United States. On the one hand, Tehran can not accept the continuation of sanctions and siege long, and it is necessary to raise the level of tension to the maximum without war, to push the Trump administration to change the terms of negotiations. On the other hand, after the US administration confirmed Iran's responsibility for the attacks in Fujairah and the Gulf of Oman, it must prepare for any Iranian efforts that would disrupt shipping in the Gulf, without causing a war with which it would be difficult to assess the consequences and end.
Concern about presence in Syria
When the Iranians, on behalf of Bashar Assad, called on Russia for direct military intervention in Syria, they did not take into account that Russia was too big to play the role of a tool to resolve the civil conflict over the future of the Arab state. It was clear from the beginning that there was a difference between the motives of Iran and Russia for the military presence in Syria, and that the matter is just a time before the beginning of this difference in the reflection at the level of political calculations and the perception of the Syrian future.
On 26 April (2019), the head of the General Staff of the Russian Forces, General Valery Girasimov said: Moscow's military support for the Assad regime, the "Syrian state collapsed" under the blows of the armed factions. Without Russian air support, Assad's regime would have collapsed in a month or a month and a half when the regime did not control more than 10 percent of Syrian territory, he said.
Graysimov's estimate is true, indeed. Despite the involvement of the Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah forces in the post-2012 period, and the influx of various Shiite militias, which Iran subsequently recruited in the war alongside the Assad regime, the regime reached the brink of the abyss in the summer and early autumn of 2015. , With much air, and hundreds of military advisers, on the ground, Syria's fate would have largely diverged. But the question is: Why did Girasimov have to say what he said? Why now, at this late hour of the Syrian civil war? Ghassimov does not need to remind Bashar Assad of the Russian role, and there is no indication that Assad has begun to pursue a policy independent of Moscow, however. Most likely, the Russian chief of staff wanted to remind the Iranian ally of the reality of the Syrian issue at a time of tension between the two parties in Syria.
Although there is a Russian naval base on the Syrian coast, intended to support the Russian fleet on average, Syria is not a vital strategic necessity for post-Soviet Russia. Syria in the strategic calculations of Russia is not Georgia, nor Ukraine, not even Azerbaijan. Bashar al-Assad was not necessarily an ally and his policies were admirable in Moscow. Russia has gone to Syria for other reasons, such as the collapse of the Russian-American understanding in the Obama administration, and the huge losses that Russia has suffered in Moscow.
The motives for the Iranian presence in Syria are very different. There are historical ties with the Assad family system and the protection of Iranian influence in Lebanon and Iraq
The departure of Ukraine from Moscow's sphere of influence, with all its meaning for national security and the treachery of the Russian people, Russia's relative loss of Georgia, the expansion of NATO to the brink of the Russian border, and the deployment by the United States of the anti-missile missile system in the European and Turkish environs prompted Putin to seek additional papers for the relationship with the United States . Syria came from heaven to Moscow, which at first thought it would push the United States to negotiate on Ukraine to strengthen the status of the Russian state in its relations with its people and re-establish Russia as a key player on the global power map. But even though the Americans were not happy with the Russian intervention in Syria, they viewed his positive side from the confrontation with the threat of state organization in Iraq and Syria. Because Syria has never been in the circle of US strategic interests, Washington has not found Russia's presence in Syria a justification for compromise.
The motives for Iranian presence in Syria are very different. On the one hand, there are historical ties with the Assad family system, the protection of Iranian influence in Lebanon and Iraq, the Iranian desire to collect as many papers as possible pending the moment of negotiations with Washington and the fear of Syria falling within the Turkish and Saudi influence circles. Have a greater influence on the Syrian armed and non-armed opposition.
Over the past year, it has become clear that the balance of power in the Syrian arena is increasingly inclined to favor the survival of the Assad regime. The regime did not completely resolve the battle against the opposition, nor succeeded in finding a policy formula to establish legitimacy for its continuation, but its control over Syrian territory widened and its presence was no longer at stake. Here, the divergence in the goals of Russia and Iran began to materialize. Iran's armed presence in Syria is seen as a threat to Israeli security. This is what prompted the Israelis, whom Moscow is keen to appease, to expropriate the Syrian space and to target the sites of Iranian concentration and storage. Iran's exit from Syria has become a precondition for any aid that Americans and Europeans, like the Gulf states, can offer to rebuild Syria (estimated at at least $ 250 billion), which is devastatingly devastating. In addition, Moscow believes that the Syrian crisis can not end without political consensus, while Iran believes that the Assad regime is encouraged to be tough and not serious in negotiating with opposition forces.
On February 27, during a visit to Moscow, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had agreed with Russian President Putin to form a committee to discuss the exit of Iran and its pro-Syrian militias from Syria. Despite the surprise of Netanyahu's statement, Moscow has made no explanation or denial to the Israeli prime minister. It is certain, however, that even though the Israelis have carried out dozens of raids on Iranian military positions in Syria, the Russian air defense system for Syria has not been activated even in one of these raids; it is believed that the Russians are usually informally Shortly before the nature of the Israeli raid.
During April, reports were reported that Russia was working to curtail the role of Maher Assad, the brother of the Syrian president, because of his close ties with the Iranians. Heavy and costly military confrontations broke out in more than one location in Syria between militias linked to Iran and others supported by Russia. Although Iran is trying to gain concessions in the Syrian oil and mining industry to compensate for its huge financial losses in support of the Assad regime, Syrian businessmen, especially Sunnis, including those close to the Assad family, are forging partnerships with Russian counterparts and speaking at a high rate The tone of the need to leave Iran from Syria, and re-links with the Arab and Gulf.
At the end of June, 2019, a meeting was held between Russian, Israeli and US national security officials. Such a meeting between the three countries is unprecedented, and there is nothing to occupy the three countries at this stage except Iran. This has led many to expect that the meeting is related to the status of Iran in Syria and how to get it out of the Syrian arena. The Russians deny that the meeting will discuss Iran getting out of together, but the Iranians, and other indicators in the same direction, are worried.
In May 2019, the Iranians tried to build a new consensus with Turkey to counter Russian pressure. But Ankara, which has taken concrete steps in its relations with Moscow, whether because of the situation in Syria or for other reasons, replied that Tehran was too late in its offer, after years of reluctance to propose proposals for Iranian-Turkish consensus in Syria, which Ankara has repeatedly proposed. Although Tehran attaches great importance to Assad's position, whether he will take a deep strategic relationship with Iran, or that he sees the Iranian presence as a burden on his regime and future, it has a network of influence that goes beyond Assad. Iran is also capable of making the Russian presence costly if the conflict between the two sides escalates to the point of jeopardizing Tehran's interests in Syria.
End of stage and another beginning
The United States certainly does not seek to ignite a war with Iran, and the latter does not want a war. Both parties, for reasons of fear of consequences, avoid igniting the war
The increasingly hostile strategic environment in the face of Iran does not mean that the region's regional influence will collapse day and night. The forces that succeed in building a regional expansion of this magnitude, especially the medium-sized forces such as Iran, which are governed by a well-established ideological system, do not lose strategically or suddenly.
The United States certainly does not seek to ignite a war with Iran, and the latter does not want a war. Both parties, for reasons of fear of consequences, avoid igniting the war. The Islamic Republic has lived with American and international sanctions for decades. There is nothing to indicate the regime's fear of a mass popular protest movement, but it shows great confidence in its ability to control and suppress any internal opposition. In the Middle East, before the wave of Arab revolutions, there were no protests the size of those witnessed in Iran in 2009, but the regime was able to confront the protests with great security efficiency.
The Iranian situation in Syria, which is closely linked to Iran's calculations and influence in Lebanon and Iraq, is not limited to military presence, after Tehran succeeded in strengthening its economic, cultural and sectarian presence, and even relations with Syrian state institutions. If Iran is forced to withdraw from Syria, that does not mean the end of its influence there.
All this is true, without a doubt. But the problem is that the risk of war with the Americans or the Saudis does not mean that Iran will get rid of the unprecedented and heavy sanctions. The regime's ability to survive does not mean the elimination of the severe effects of sanctions on the economic and financial situation of the Iranian state. The Iranians. The shrinking of Iran's financial and economic capabilities will lead to a reduction in Iran's ability to undertake foreign influence projects and to support existing or potential allies in areas targeted by Iranian influence.
One of the consequences of sanctions and blockade can be seen, for example, in the nature of Iran's relations with Iraq, where Iran was the master of the Iraqi political arena. Today, Iraqi politicians feel Iran's urgent need for Iraq, which can become one of the squares of circumventing some sanctions. They see Iran as a burden on their country. Region. There is also doubt about Iran's ability to provide financial and economic support to the Assad regime, which was the other side (along with military support) in the equation of Damascus subordination to Tehran.
Whatever the size and scope of Iran's influence in Syria, if Iran is forced to withdraw militarily from the country, many, including the Assad regime, will see that Iran has been defeated by Israel and that it is too weak to resist Russian pressure. Such a situation would make Iran's opponents in and around the Assad regime more vocal and make the regime as a whole freer in its decision, including in the sphere of issues affecting Iranian influence in Syria. The additional and dangerous problem in Iran's strategic expansion is that it is located in areas where it is not popularly welcomed, in whole or in part, but finds popular resistance in other cases.
Over the past few years, Iran's strategic expansion in the regional environment has reached an unprecedented level, armed with ideological determination, an ambitious vision of national interests and an initiative to capture the opportunities offered by regional adversaries and the United States. Iranian influence has expanded in a way that the modern Iranian state has not known since its formation in the early 20th century. Iran may benefit from its historical experience of strategic expansion, despite the blockade and isolation in overcoming US sanctions. But it is, however, not the first power in history to go beyond its capacity to manage and afford costs. When a certain power fails to recognize the boundary between the necessary strategic expansion and that which transcends the limits of self-sufficiency, the decline becomes inevitable.
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This article is taken from Al Jazeera Center for Studies.