Articles

By:  Ariane Tabatabai 

Confronted by the Trump administration’s ‘maximum pressure’ policy and by hardliners at home, Iran’s Rohani is fighting a losing battle for negotiations, not conflict, with the U.S.

President Donald Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal with Iran a year ago. Since then, tensions between the two countries have increased steadily, as the United States has dialed up pressure on Iran in the hopes of either bringing it back to the negotiating table or ushering in the regime’s collapse. 

And inside Iran, a vigorous debate is taking place about U.S. intentions, the impact of the American “maximum pressure” campaign, and the best course of action for the Islamic Republic.

The tensions within the U.S. administration regarding U.S. foreign policy in general and Iran policy in particular are well documented.

President Trump campaigned on a platform of dialing down U.S. interventions abroad and has showed reluctance to implicate America in military confrontations. But members of his administration have a track record of advocating for a more interventionist American foreign policy.

Similar tensions over escalating military conflict or not animate the debate behind the scenes within Iran, and how to respond to U.S. efforts to isolate it.

The leader of the moderate camp, President Hassan Rohani, may well be interested in responding to President Trump’s reiteratedpreference for negotiations rather than conflict. But Rohani, too, has to grapple with those preferring a more muscular, confrontational approach to U.S.-Iran relations.

Iranian foreign policy is often contentious at home. The most significant foreign policy decisions over the past decade – including the nuclear deal and Iran’s intervention in Syria – have been the source of tremendous domestic infighting – within the confines of what the regime permits and the framework set by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Today, Iran’s next steps vis-à-vis the United States and the nuclear deal are debated extensively and will determine not only the future of the nuclear deal – which Iran’s President Rohani and even some hardliners would like to sustain until the next U.S. presidential elections in November 2020 – but whether significant military conflict will break out between Iran and the U.S. 

Ever since President Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal on May 8, 2018, President Rohani had been under major pressure to retaliate. Rohani managed to stall for exactly a year. He announced on May 8, 2019 that his country would begin to take steps to scale back its compliance with some provisions of the deal. 

That announcement was designed to put pressure on the remaining European, Russian and Chinese parties to the agreement to step up their efforts to sustain it. Rohani wanted to demonstrate both strength and restraint at once, affording his government the flexibility to dial up or down its cooperation with the nuclear deal’s remaining signatories – particularly the Europeans.

But he was also signaling to his domestic audience that, contrary to the claims made by his critics over long months, Tehran wasn’t just sitting on its hands while the United States engaged in a long and comprehensive economic war against it, as well as broader efforts to pressure the Islamic Republic into submission. 

The Rohani government is trying to buy itself both the time and political capital to sustain the nuclear deal until November 2020, when both the fate of the U.S. administration and its Iran policy will be determined. 

But at home, almost four years after its signing, the agreement remains as controversial as ever and Rohani has spent virtually the entirety of his second term in office selling and defending it – and now faces even more diminishing returns.

In defending the deal, Rohani has contended that the agreement has paid economic dividends – an argument that’s increasingly less viable as the U.S. sanctions on key sectors of the Iranian economy ramp back up. 

And Rohani has long seen the nuclear deal as a stabilizing force and bulwark against American (or Israeli) military intervention in Iran.

He’s argued, for example, that without the deal, the threat of war that had loomed ever larger in the years preceding the nuclear negotiations would likely have materialized. That would, he contends, have thrown Iranians into an armed conflict as devastating as the eight-year bloody war with Iraq (1980-88). 

Just as Rohani has long stated that the deal removed the threat of a war with the world’s largest military, and proved the primacy of negotiations and compromise over confrontation, so have his hardline opponents argued the exact opposite. 

Hardliners declare that Iran should rely on strength, not concessions – as Rouhani has done – to secure its territory and pursue its interests. 

Those affiliated to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and conservatives in general, have argued that Iran should be working with regional partners, including non-state militant actors, instead of relying on and engaging with the West.

The West, they claim, has always failed Iranians – at best – or actively sought to hurt them, at worst, while Iran’s regional partners have been loyal friends. 

And to drive home this point, the IRGC has a track record of testing missiles and unveiling new domestically-developed military equipment to project power both at home and abroad.

Abroad, the IRGC, recently designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the Trump administration, has the proven capacity to carry out these semi-autonomous military activities to further specific hardline strategies, both sending a message to the Americans and to further pressure Rohani. 

Rouhani’s critics also deny the nuclear deal fundamentally changed U.S. hostility towards the Islamic Republic. They have long argued that what’s changed is not U.S. intentions but rather the means Washington employs. Rather than pursuing its policy of regime change through military means, the United States pivoted towards waging war through economic means and hostile psychological operations.

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s the Iranian regime’s hardliners, those who’ve long warned that Washington couldn’t be trusted and opposed engaging with U.S. administrations and with the nuclear deal, who now argue that, despite its rhetoric, the Trump administration isn’t inclined to go to war, and that its recent much-reported redirection of military resources to the Middle East aren’t unusual. This view seems to be broadly shared by Iran’s armed forces. 

This is in stark contrast to the commentary and analysis of some reformist and moderate figures, whose view is that the U.S. threats should be taken seriously. 

Behind this dichotomy are different understandings of the nature of U.S. government. Hardliners largely see all U.S. administrations as one and the same, while the moderates are more inclined to see shades of gray and ascribe different guiding philosophies to each of them.

Moderates see the current U.S. administration as more unpredictable and militarily-inclined than Obama’s. Thus staying in the nuclear deal and/or re-engaging with the U.S. are critical to de-escalate military tensions.

In turn, hardliners play down the threat of war to reassure Iranians and block any attempt to negotiate with America. 

Indeed, Rohani critics have suggested that those moderates advocating for the American threats to be taken seriously – and pushing the critical need for negotiations with Washington – are themselves being duped by U.S. psy-ops directed against Tehran.

In any case, the hardline Ayatollah Khamenei and key IRGC commanders have effectively shut down the idea of returning to the negotiating table, forcing the Rohani government to fall in line. Just this week, Khamenei stated that Iran wouldn’t return to negotiations and that it sees “resistance” to America’s pursuit of war by other means as the only way forward. 

But he also emphasized, echoing Iranian military chiefs, that Iran wasn’t looking for war and didn’t believe that the United States was either. Clearly part of the reason for making that point was to reassure Iranians, as tensions continue to mount between the two countries. 

From reformists to hardliners, all Iranian factions appear united in their view that there shouldn’t be a war with the United States. As the regime’s national security decision-making process is based on consensus-building, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which Iran rushes into a conflict without broad support from such divergent key stakeholders, ranging from the Supreme Leader, to Rohani’s government, to the armed forces.

At the same time, the IRGC’s regional activities sometimes escape the vetting of the Iranian government; Rohani may not have a say in any escalatory actions they may undertake in various regional theaters. 

Iran’s next presidential elections will take place in 2021. Rohani won’t be running: he’s already completed the two terms afforded by the constitution. But his moderate bloc and allies desperately need something to show for their time in office, and their portfolio of successes is currently pretty thin, providing Rohani’s opponents with ample content and room with which to criticize him.  

Rohani is clearly keen to ensure the nuclear deal – his major personal and ideological achievement – remains in place, for now. In this pursuit, he still seems to enjoy popular support and enough backing within the regime, although pressure on his policies and their efficacy continues to mount. 

Despite Rohani and his moderate bloc considering that engaging with the United States is an essential and immediate need – to stop the suffocation of increasing sanctions and to de-escalate the threat of war – the odds of them achieving it aren’t in their favor. 

Ariane M. Tabatabai is an associate political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation. 

By:  Ali Vaez Director of the Iran project at the International Crisis Group

MAY 12, 2019….The one thing Tehran would find more intolerable than the crushing impact of sanctions is raising the white flag because of them.

A magnificent fresco adorns the main pavilion of the royal palace in the Iranian city of Isfahan, depicting the 16th-century Battle of Chaldiran, fought between the Turkish-Ottoman and Persian-Safavid empires. The fresco appears to show the Persian army victorious, having crushed its Turkish adversary. The truth is that Chaldiran marked a decisive victory for the Ottomans, who went on to annex eastern Anatolia and northern Iraq. But what the self-serving historical distortion suggests is not shame of defeat but pride in the heroic valor with which the Iranians resisted a foe that outnumbered them and, unlike them, possessed heavy artillery. Donald Trump’s administration, which has made bringing Iranians to their knees the cornerstone of its Mideast policy half a millennium later, should draw a lesson from the battle and the way the Persians digested defeat.

It has been one year since President Trump reneged on the 2015 nuclear dealthat rolled back Iran’s nuclear activities and placed them under the most rigorous international inspection regime ever implemented anywhere. Then came one of the most draconian sanctions regimes ever imposed by Washington on any adversary. So far, the U.S. Treasury has blacklisted nearly 1,000 Iranian entities and individuals, targeting nearly all sectors of Iran’s economy.

There can be little doubt that the administration’s “maximum pressure” policy is inflicting considerable economic harm on Iran. Economic growth that followed the lifting of sanctions in 2016 has given way to an inflationary recession. The Iranian currency has lost two-thirds of its value, as oil exports have dropped by more than half and will likely fall further still. Although food and medicine are exempt from sanctions, lack of access to the global financial system is giving rise to a humanitarian crisis. Some families have not been able to eat meat for months and are suffering from shortages of specialized medicine.

To date, however, there is no sign that either Iran’s regional policies are shifting or its leaders are willing to come back to the negotiating table and submit to the Trump administration’s demands. Nor is there any hint that economic hardship has triggered popular unrest of a magnitude that would threaten the regime’s survival. In the absence of any visible shift in Tehran’s political calculus, Washington is presenting the sanctions’ impact by no metric other than their quantity and severity.

There appears to be a belief among U.S. policy makers, almost congealed into doctrine, that Iran will cave to nothing less than massive pressure, a point it clearly has not reached. With U.S. elections at the end of next year, the administration is therefore responding to Iran’s refusal to concede defeat by doubling down, and it’s going about it in a hurry. It has resorted to the unprecedented steps of designating a state entity, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a “foreign terrorist organization,” and of trying to push Iran’s oil exports to zero almost overnight.

This policy is unlikely to succeed for three main reasons.

First and most important: The one thing Tehran would find more intolerable than the crushing impact of sanctions is raising the white flag because of them. Convinced that Trump’s national-security team is bent on toppling the Islamic Republic, the Iranian leadership views economic sanctions as just one in a range of measures designed to destabilize it. Its counterstrategy can be summed up in two words: Resist and survive. The mere act of survival would constitute victory, however pyrrhic.

Tehran believes it has history on its side. Neither besiegement nor prolonged economic suffering is new to Iran’s rulers or its people. They have previously witnessed nearly half of the country’s oil revenue evaporate during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, again during the Asian financial crisis in 1997, and a third time as a result of the European oil embargo and U.S. sanctions in 2012. They know how to get around sanctions and keep state and society afloat.

Second, Tehran feels compelled to prove to U.S. policy makers the bankruptcy of their belief that severe pressure can force Tehran to yield. Iran may have sued for compromise when it faced potential existential threats in the past, but strategic gain outweighed the cost each time. In 1988, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini reluctantly declared that he would “drink from the poison chalice,” agreeing to a cease-fire with Iraq. But when the guns fell silent, after having suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, Iran had managed to consolidate the young republic’s rule without losing an inch of territory. A similar logic applied in 2003, when after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and, separately, the exposure of Iran’s secret nuclear activities, Tehran pushed the pause button on the nuclear program, lest it become the next target for regime change, and proposed a grand bargain to Washington. Nothing came of what was essentially an invitation to dialogue, in part because the Bush administration’s Iraq adventure proved a strategic disaster.

And third, if past is prologue, Iran will not negotiate with Washington unless it knows it has a relatively strong hand. As Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei put it, when Iran entered into serious (but then still secret) negotiations with the United States in 2012, it had accumulated significant leverage, in the form of thousands of nuclear centrifuges, tons of low-enriched uranium, bunkered uranium-enrichment facilities, and a nearly completed heavy-water reactor.

President Barack Obama took two additional steps that persuaded Iran to talk and ultimately reach a deal: He took regime change off the table and openly declared that Iran, in principle, would be allowed to enrich uranium on its own soil. So if coercive diplomacy was a factor in bringing Iran to the table, it was not the only, and perhaps not even the principal, one. Iran had built up leverage that it could trade against the lifting of sanctions, and it was offered a realistic way forward. Today the Iranian leadership sees nothing of the sort. That is why it rolled back some of its commitments this week and issued an ultimatum to the deal’s remaining parties that either they step up to salvage the deal or it would step aside from its commitments.

These factors suggest that whatever the benefits, great risks are built into Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign. For one thing, it increases the threat of a nuclear escalation: If Iran reneges on its obligations under the nuclear deal, the United States and Israel will respond by targeting Iran’s resurgent nuclear program, and Iran might direct its allies in the region to target Western assets and personnel.

But even without such a nightmare scenario, the Trump administration’s approach is self-defeating in the long term. The sanctions will reduce Iran’s pro-Western middle class to tatters at a time when the country stands in front of a major transition to a post-1979 leadership. Regime hard-liners, meanwhile, stand to benefit financially from sanctions through their control of the black market and politically through their control of a repressive apparatus to put down dissent. The net effect is a country with its economy in ruins but its regime intact—a political victory snatched from the jaws of economic defeat.

Sanctions, the U.S. travel ban, and a lack of sensitivity to Iranians’ sense of dignity could combine to harden the perception that U.S. policy is indiscriminate and implacable. This is a formula for perpetuating enmity between the two countries for another generation.

Trump and his closest advisers may discover that history will not bend to their will. Rather than trying to achieve the unattainable goal of Iran’s surrender, they should act to prevent another costly U.S. war of choice. This would require stepping back from maximalist demands, and using sanctions as a scalpel, not a chainsaw. In practice, that would mean lifting sanctions gradually and conditionally. The question is whether Trump can find his way out of the escalating confrontation, toward win-win negotiations.

A series of escalations in both word and deed have raised fears of U.S.-Iranian military confrontation, either direct or by proxy. It is urgent that cooler heads prevail – in European capitals as in Tehran and Washington – to head off the threat of a disastrous war.

For the past year, relations between the U.S. and Iran have brought to mind a slow-motion train wreck. Of late, the pace has dangerously accelerated, and tensions could soon lead to a catastrophic collision. A crash is not inevitable, but it could well occur – deliberately or as a product of miscalculation – unless both parties and outside actors take urgent steps to slow way down or switch to another track.

On 12 May, four oil tankers off the coast of Fujaira, a port in the United Arab Emirates on the Gulf of Oman, were hit by apparent sabotage. Two days later, drones attacked two oil pumping stations along the East-West pipeline in Saudi Arabia between the capital Riyadh and the port city of Yanbu. These two separate events may or may not be linked, may or may not involve Iran, and may or may not provoke a response. But, coming against a backdrop of significant escalation between Washington and Tehran, they represent ominous warning signs.

In the past few weeks, the Trump administration has doubled down on its efforts to strangle Iran’s economy. Not content with having unilaterally withdrawn from the 2015 nuclear deal, it is now pushing to reduce Iran’s oil exports to zero. It has designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organisation. It has also started to flex its military muscle by deploying warships, bomber jets and missile defence batteries to the Middle East to counter unspecified “Iranian threats”.

Tehran has not remained passive. It has labelled U.S. forces in the region as terrorists; downgraded its compliance with the nuclear deal, warning of further steps unless the deal’s remaining parties deliver tangible economic benefits; threatened to shut the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for the global oil and gas trade; and pledged to retaliate against any attack upon its assets or interests. Without offering proof, U.S. officials claim that Iran has also given licence to its regional proxies to target U.S. interests, suggesting that such an attack could occur in Iraq or one of the Gulf monarchies allied to Washington. In a worrying move, on 15 May it ordered the departure of non-essential U.S. personnel from Iraq.

 Escalation comes easily; de-escalation is a much taller order, especially in the absence of direct channels of communication that can pre-empt misunderstandings or miscalculations. 

All this ratcheting-up of tension was entirely predictable, and most of it is entirely provoked by the U.S. With Iran having increasingly less to lose as a result of U.S. sanctions, which are eating away at its already weak economy, it was virtually bound to become less risk-averse in the nuclear realm and more aggressive in the region. For months now, the more hardline elements of the Islamic Republic have been urging the leadership to impose a cost on the U.S. in order to deter it from stepping up sanctions and to show that, if the U.S. could hurt Iran, so too could Tehran wound Washington.

Perhaps these actions are a prelude to negotiations: the U.S. is exerting “maximum pressure”, it says, to bring a more compliant Iran back to the table; in like manner, should Tehran conclude that it has no choice but to reach a new deal with Washington in order to relieve unsustainable economic strain, it will want to enter such talks with a stronger hand. Resuming its nuclear activities, making its presence felt in the region, and disrupting Saudi or Emirati oil exports could all be ways of enhancing its bargaining power. But if these manoeuvres are a diplomatic game, it is a dangerous one: either side could misinterpret the other’s intentions. Any Iranian move could easily lead to U.S. and/or Israeli strikes which, in turn, could lead to an Iranian counter-response. Or vice versa. Escalation comes easily; de-escalation is a much taller order, especially in the absence of direct channels of communication that can pre-empt misunderstandings or miscalculations.

In short, whether or not Tehran was directly or indirectly behind the recent attacks (the Huthis in Yemen claimed responsibility for the attacks in Saudi Arabia; the earlier offshore incident has gone unclaimed; Iran has denied any connection to the incidents and called for an investigation), and whether or not Washington is manufacturing accusations to justify a spike in military activity, all the ingredients for an escalation are present. Even assuming that neither side seeks war, growing friction at all the flashpoints between the two sides (see our Trigger List early-warning platform) mean that intentions may not suffice to prevent it. The consequences could be calamitous for states and peoples in the immediate region, but also for the international economy, given its high dependence on the free flow of oil from the Gulf.

It is not too late to avert this outcome. Key to de-escalation will be the ability of the remaining parties to the nuclear deal to give Iran an economic reprieve. In particular, Europe could shed its reluctance to indirectly import Iranian oil in partnership with Russia and China. If Russia swaps oil with Iran and China continues to import Iranian crude, the transactions would generate credit that the parties could inject into Europe’s special purpose financial vehicle (Instex), allowing Iran to engage in trade with these countries without access to the U.S.- dominated global financial system. These countries could also provide Iran with development aid to repair and renew its infrastructure. With Europe demonstrating willingness to go the extra mile, Iran should reciprocate by returning into full compliance with the nuclear deal. It also should exhibit restraint on the regional front and refrain from steps – direct or taken through partners – that could provoke its foes.

As for President Donald Trump, he faces a choice. Everything about his 2016 presidential campaign pointed in the direction of avoiding another costly and unnecessary military entanglement in the Middle East. So, too, does much about the vows he has made to his constituency since entering office. But everything about his administration’s policy toward Iran points in a strikingly different direction: toward war, by design or mistake. He says he wants the U.S. and Iran to talk. Yet he should know that the Islamic Republic will not start a dialogue if it feels it has a gun to its head; it will respond to perceived aggression in like manner, and that response could in turn engender an uncontrollable downward spiral. A back-channel dialogue eventually may be possible, but for that the U.S. ought to tone down its rhetoric and offer the Iranian leadership an off-ramp, for example by signalling its preparedness to put aside its maximalist demands and to find a mutually acceptable compromise.

President Trump might think that time is on his side, as sanctions continue to take their toll on the Iranian economy. But the wait-and-see period may have reached the end of its natural life. A crisis that he may not want but that some of his advisers may not mind lies just around the corner. It is past time for cooler heads to prevail and for all to move decisively to take the trains off collision course.

We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.

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Jamshid Chalangi:

With our warm greetings from our London studios, tonight we will look at escalating US-Iran tension and find out if the Iranian people know what exactly is happening in this crisis.

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We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

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Our guests to discuss these news stories tonight are political activists Hassan Shariatmadari and Heshmat Tabarzadi.

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We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.

Read More »

Jamshid Chalangi:

Tonight we will look at the escalating crisis between Iran and US as Mike Pompeo says the Iran-backed militias in Iraq had been planning to attack US forces in that country.

We will also find out what is the main aim of putting more pressure on Iran as Brian Hook, the US special envoy on Iran affairs says America is not after overthrowing the Tehran regime or enter a war with it.

Meanwhile the value of US dollar against Rial has gone up as news of more major corruption in Iran has surfaced.

Our guests tonight are Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh and Mr Ardeshir Zareh in Toronto.

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We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

We continue the program with talking to our special guest of every Thursday, Dr. Mohsen Sazegara, for his views about news of Iran and the Middle East.

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