Former US President Barack Obama wrote in his memoirs titled "The Promised Land": "We worked during my administration to envision scenarios in which a possible war with Iran would look like. I was finishing these discussions burdened with the realization that if the war itself was imposed, it would mean squandering everything I was trying to do." Accomplished. " Obama's strategy was to negotiate with a number of international powers for the 2015 deal that succeeded in curtailing the Iranian nuclear program. According to the memoirs of John Brennan, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the Obama administration, which were issued in 2020 under the title "The Intrepid", Obama believed that the Iranian nuclear deal was "important; not only for regional stability, but also for strengthening the thorn." Iranian moderates, especially Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. "
The United States, headed by Donald Trump, has tried to take the opposite course by withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal and trying to pressure Tehran to surrender or collapse. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in 2018: “Iran will be forced to choose; either the struggle to keep its economy on hold Life or squandering enormous fortunes on conflicts outside its territory. It will not have the resources to do both. " Nevertheless, brutality continued at home in Iran with Iran's regional ambitions, and the scope of its nuclear program expanded further.
Today, Biden must stand up to Iran, which is taking steady steps towards possessing the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons, is directly involved in the world's worst humanitarian catastrophe, and is gaining influence at the expense of other countries by threatening the global economy and political stability. Dictator Bashar al-Assad, a client of Tehran, has exacerbated the largest global refugee crisis we have seen since World War II, spurring populists across Europe. The proxy war in Yemen between Saudi Arabia and the Houthi movement - another client of Tehran - has also caused a terrible humanitarian crisis, and brought back diseases that humanity had previously overcome and forgotten. In addition, Iran has demonstrated its ability to launch precision missile and drone attacks against Saudi oil facilities; This poses a threat to global energy supplies, and heralds wars in the Middle East.Sophisticated Iranian cyberattacks have successfully targeted US elections and commerce, as well as the critical infrastructure of US allies.
Despite the pressing security challenges posed by Iran, the US strategy that focuses exclusively on the nuclear and regional ambitions of the Iranian government and turns a blind eye to the Iranian people's democratic aspirations ignores the lessons of the end of the Cold War. Can the United States use pressure and diplomacy not only to end the Iranian nuclear program and its regional influence, but also to dominate it domestically? This is Biden's challenge. He needs a strategic framework that looks at Iran for what it is.
The nature of the Islamic Republic after the 1979 revolution transformed Iran from a pro-American monarchy into an enemy religious state, and seven American presidents tried to change US-Iranian relations, Iranian behavior, or the entire Iranian regime, but they all failed. Throughout that period, the Islamic Republic proved to be adept at surviving, but, like many revolutionary regimes, it was incapable of reform. American experts on Iranian affairs have also suffered from diplomatic alienation for four decades - for example, the US State Department has more Albanian speakers than Persian speakers - but the persistence of Iran's revolutionary ideology reveals the identity of the Iranian regime.
Iran plays a major role, on a large scale, in global security and humanitarian challenges, including Islamic extremism, energy security, cyber warfare, nuclear proliferation, and the wars in Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan. The reason for this is the vast area of Iran (it is 75 times the size of Israel, four times the size of Germany), its strategic geographic location, its richness in natural resources, the ideological enthusiasm of the people, in addition to its sponsorship of foreign militias. Iran's leaders have always continued to oppose the United States, making it a priority over the welfare and security of the people. This was evident recently when Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei banned coronavirus vaccines manufactured in the United States, despite Iran being one of the countries hit hard by the pandemic.
Khamenei, 81, is considered one of the longest-ruling autocrats in the world until the moment. Khamenei has not left Iran since inheriting power from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, and his tireless sponsorship of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps - the most powerful Iranian institution - helped him crush opposition and weaken Potential competitors, including four former Iranian presidents. Despite the manifestations of competition between Iranian power centers, Khamenei also has effective authority over the Guardian Council, the Assembly of Experts of Leadership, and the Expediency Council, all of which are phantom supervisory institutions, but in reality they prove Khamenei's authority.
John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Yale University, noted in his classic book "Containment Strategies," that the successful American containment of the Soviet Union - which was laid by George Kennan, the most prominent orchestrator of American policy during the Cold War - was based on three important axes: Fortifying America's allies and partners (including Iran in 1946), fragmenting the international communist movement, and employing enticement and intimidation in an attempt to "modify Soviet behavior." These goals were not mutually exclusive, but rather were parts of a mutually reinforcing strategy.
The Trump administration had four years to prove the validity of the alternative theory, which says that increased US pressure without diplomacy could break the Iranian regime.
Although Trump subjected Iran to massive economic humiliation and deprivation - including the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the highest Iranian military commander, in January 2020 - the Iranian regime united its ranks, and the nuclear program doubled 12 times, and Iran's regional influence did not suffer any harm despite the reduction in expenditures. .
In short, the only policy that achieved any significant impact on Iran's behavior was a mixture of significant international pressure and uncompromising American diplomacy.
The Pentagon announced that the commander of the Iranian Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, and the commander of the Iraqi militia, Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, were killed on January 03, 2020, following an American air strike on Baghdad International Airport.
Reviving the nuclear deal is the Biden administration's most important challenge right now. This should not be difficult theoretically, as Washington wants Iran to back down from the steps of its nuclear advance, and Iran will not be able to heal its economic collapse without a complete or partial revival of the agreement. Although the road to reviving the agreement has been blocked so far due to the internal policies of both Washington and Tehran, the great distrust between the two parties, and tactical differences, these obstacles must ultimately be overcome.
On the other hand, a greater challenge will be the Biden administration’s declared intention to “extend the duration of the nuclear agreement and strengthen it, as it wants to extend its expiration date beyond 2023, when some of the terms of the agreement expire, and it also wants to expand the scope of the agreement to include non-nuclear issues that are of concern. Such as Iran’s deployment of high-precision missiles to its regional proxies. Critics of Biden’s approach believe that his administration should try to strengthen the agreement before returning to it, not after returning, taking advantage of the sanctions imposed by the Trump administration. Regardless of the arrangement, any US attempts to fortify the agreement will meet. Fierce opposition along the line from Iran. As for the pressure on Iran, which the Biden administration should retreat to revive the nuclear deal, it may need to be exercised again in order to improve the nuclear deal.
For those advisers who prefer a quick return to the nuclear deal, the calculations are simple: Should Biden start his presidential term with a potential escalation crisis with Iran in the midst of the pandemic, or should he delay this possibility?
Biden’s critics, who are mostly Republicans, cite Henry Kissinger: "The pressure of competition leads one to believe that postponing an issue means avoiding its problems, but it is often a response to disaster."
US President "Joe Biden"
There is no region in the world that threatens global stability as much as the Middle East, and no country in the Middle East has benefited as much from regional instability as Iran. Iran's expanding influence in four conflict-torn Arab countries - Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen - is attributed to the power vacuum created by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Arab uprisings in 2011, and decades of failed governance. This Arab chaos helps Iran's ambitions, and this Iranian ambition, in turn, exacerbates the Arab chaos.
Iran's regional policy has three axes: anti-United States, anti-Israel, and anti-Saudi Arabia. Tehran sought to achieve these goals by creating a network of foreign militias - similar to the Lebanese Hezbollah - estimated to have between 50,000 to 200,000 fighters. As the only religious country in the Middle East, Iran has been able to exploit Islamic extremism - Shiite, and sometimes Sunni - more effectively than all of its peers. Indeed, although the Iranian-Saudi hostility is often considered a sectarian war between the Shiites of Iran and the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia, the important qualitative advantage that Tehran enjoys, unlike Riyadh, is that all Shiite extremists are hypothetically prepared to fight in its ranks, while virtually all wanting Sunni extremists, including the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, topple the Saudi government.
An Iranian-Saudi detente may be possible, as for Israel, Tehran has made it clear that it will never recognize the agreement. Tehran has provided hundreds of millions of dollars to the Islamic Jihad and Hamas movements in Palestine, and, through Hezbollah, has managed to collect more than 100,000 shells and missiles in Lebanon, all directed against Israel, and it is also rapidly building military bases in Syria to open another front. Against the Jewish state. Israel, in turn, retaliated by carrying out up to 6 assassinations of nuclear scientists inside Iran, and more than 200 bombings in the areas of Iranian concentration in Syria, in addition to devastating cyber attacks that ravaged Iran's infrastructure and nuclear facilities. Citing a Persian proverb, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif once told me: "In war and fighting, sweets are not distributed."
Although Iranian influence in the Middle East cannot be erased, it can be effectively exposed, countered, and contained. The nuclear agreement proved that it is possible to achieve a mixture of global pressure and continued US diplomacy - represented by limiting Iran's nuclear program, not eliminating it - in the context of seeking a satisfactory outcome for all parties. The same amounts of the mixture should also be used in order to limit Iran's influence, instead of eliminating it completely. This does not require that the Arabs ostensibly accept Iranian violations of their state’s sovereignty. But it will be imperative for Arabs to seek to set enforceable limits to limit certain forms of misconduct pursued by Tehran, instead of a naive demand to “expel” Iran from the Arab world, as Adel has demanded Al-Jubeir, the former Saudi foreign minister, in 2018.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, known as the "JCPOA" for short, was a 159-page document in great detail that carefully and precisely explained how Iran's nuclear program would be scaled down and subject to greater transparency. Likewise, the United States 'regional allies should present a coherent prescription similar to how to curb Iran's support for its regional proxies and its violations of their states' sovereignty. Similar to the positive incentives that the JCPOA provided to Iran in order to concede, the Arab Gulf states must be prepared to talk not only about their concerns and demands, but also about ways of joint cooperation with Iran. Climate change is a logical start for this cooperation, given what it may cause soon by warming regions in both Iran and the Arab world to the point where they are no longer suitable for life.
Shared concerns about Iran, and the US withdrawal from the Middle East, helped the Trump administration to engineer the normalization of relations between Israel and a number of Arab countries, including the UAE and Bahrain. Nevertheless, the strongest defense against Iranian encroachment in the region will be the building of Arab states and coherent national identities, just as the nationalism of the associates of the Soviet Union played a pivotal role in confronting the communist ideology.
Although the Lebanese Hezbollah, and elements of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, are working efficiently as an extension of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Tehran can no longer guarantee the continuation of its popular support among the Arab Shiites. In November 2019, demonstrators attacked and set fire to the Iranian consulate in Najaf and Karbala, and Lebanese Shiites demonstrated against Hezbollah in the city of Nabatiyeh, in southern Lebanon. Opinion polls show that more than half of the Arab Shiites now have a "negative" view of Iran. Few of the Arab Shiites, despite the grievances they suffer in their country, see the religious state in Iran as a role model.
Washington's attempts have so far failed to catalyze political change in Tehran. Efforts to strengthen the reformists ’thorn within the Iranian regime in the face of hardline competitors have also not been successful. The reformists lack the will, and the hardliners are well-armed. The United States has made no significant progress in its attempts to motivate defenseless and disunited Iranian civilians to rise up in the face of an organized, repressive and well-armed Iranian leadership. The Islamic Republic has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to throttle the Internet and kill thousands of citizens in the dark, similar to what it did in November 2019. Change in authoritarian countries requires not only popular pressure, but also divisions within the elite. When the whole system believes in its security apparatus, it faces two options; "He either fought or was killed" - as in Syria - he has no objection to embarking on the implementation of the first option.
Opponents of the Islamic Republic, both inside Iran and in the region, fear that a revival of the nuclear deal could empower the Iranian regime. But history has shown that political opposition is not fueled by extreme poverty. Rather - according to what is known as the J-curve theory - the improvement of economic conditions in society raises the ceiling of expectations that cannot be kept up with and satisfied. For this reason, it is possible that the short-term economic improvement that could result from the lifting of US sanctions will destabilize the Iranian regime in the medium and long term, and not consolidate its foundations as some believe. The more the Iranians understand that their leadership, not Washington, is what is preventing them from a better future, the more the country's stronger ideology - Iranian nationalism - will turn to be against the regime itself and not a tool in its service.
The Biden administration represents both an opportunity and a challenge for leadership in Tehran. The revival of the nuclear deal may help turn the tide of Iran's declining economy, but it may make it difficult for the Islamic Republic to continue blaming the United States for its countless failures. Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian academic who was recently released by Iran, told me: “Many in prison breathed a sigh of relief when Trump lost the election. The Revolutionary Guards were definitely disappointed.”
History does not favor the Islamic Republic, like all dictatorships, which lack mechanisms of democratic renewal and use massive repression as a primary tool for controlling dissent. And while most modern economies try to gain a better understanding of how to foster technological innovation, combat climate change, and foster diversification; Iran's elderly religious leaders sell oil to maintain an intolerant revolutionary ideology, and even export it. Iranian officials themselves admit that the emigration of skilled workers costs the state $ 150 billion annually, which is much more than the state’s oil revenue. Ultimately, this economic, political, and social ailment will have consequences that US policy must plan to facilitate, not obstruct.
Four decades after the founding of the Islamic Republic, the only hope lies in a youthful, energetic and educated society, eager to live like the people of South Korea, not North, thrive and live at peace with the world.
It may take years to build a tunnel to cross from the religious state of Iran to a democratic Iran, but the completion of this construction is the only thing that matters to the Middle East transformation.
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This article is translated from The Atlantic and does not necessarily represent the Meydan website.