Israel’s push, Trump’s pause…The Iran dilemma

United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s scary admission a week ago during a US Senate hearing was the first signal that, in the asylum of cuckoos surrounding the cascading US-Iran tensions, voices of sanity were asserting. 

Responding to a question on military movements near Iran, Rubio told the senators with disarming candour: “I would imagine it would be even far more complex than the one we're describing now [regarding the way forward in Venezuela], because you're talking about a regime that’s in place for a very long time. So that’s going to require a lot of careful thinking, if that eventuality ever presents itself.”

Rubio characterised the US military presence in the Gulf as primarily defensive, with an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 US troops stationed at eight or nine facilities that are within range of thousands of Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles and short‑range ballistic missiles. 

“We have to have enough force and power in the region, just on a baseline, to defend against that possibility that at some point, as a result of something, the Iranian regime decides to strike at our troop presence in the region,” Rubio told the senators. Rubio stressed the need to de-escalate. 

Actually, the wheel has come full circle: Israel and the powerful Jewish lobby sold the hypothesis that another shot at weakening Iran’s deterrent capability was overdue, and US President Donald Trump must act, but the latter realises that life is real.

Israeli intelligence has gone the whole hog to fuel the discontent within Iran over harsh economic conditions, misgovernance, and rampant corruption. But an attack on Iran is way beyond Israel’s capacity. Israel experienced large-scale destruction in the June conflict, and had to beseech Trump to arrange a ceasefire.

Since June, Iran has boosted its missile capability. The New York Times estimates that targeting Iran is riskier than ousting Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, as Tehran’s ability to strike Israel and destabilise the wider Middle East makes it a far more dangerous adversary.

Rubio, a great friend of Israel, hit the nail on the head when he admitted that the administration doesn’t have the foggiest idea how to follow through a regime change in Iran. A democratic Opposition must first appear over time internally, and that cannot happen so long as the crippling US sanctions exist. The Shah’s grandson as a rallying point? It must be a joke.

He has no grassroots support; in reality, the authoritarian streak in his DNA already sticks out. People will not accept him. His supporters are limited to the diaspora living in exile in the West, drawn from the old exploitative regime that the 1979 revolution overthrew. Trump senses it and is ignoring the Pahlavi pretender.

The prospects of a negotiated ‘de-escalation’ may have improved in recent weeks. Largely, it depends on Trump. It was he who escalated the current situation by threatening to intervene to change the government in Iran. Thereby, Trump rushed the US into a most delicate situation. Moreover, he began defining his objectives on the go, and is changing tack at will.

The plain truth is, Trump, a genuinely peace-loving President whose tolerance of a serious war is zero, has painted himself into a corner. Trump’s Achilles heel is domestic. He's apprehensive that Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule will come into play — ‘You break it, you own it’. Tehran very well understands the MAGA dynamics.

The regional states want a negotiated agreement. But the US should have something to offer to Iran in a give-and-take — for a start, cessation of hostilities and real sanctions relief, plus a guarantee that the US will not renege on a deal. It is not too much to offer considering that it is Trump's 'maximum pressure' policy that ruined Iran's economy and plunged the nation into such poverty.

Iran also does not want a war but will resist US aggression. Therefore, the threat of war is quite serious. The protests began as an outburst of public anger as the merchants took to the streets following a precipitous fall of the Iranian currency that was engineered by powerful financial centres in the West and Israel. They spread to over 190 cities and morphed into a demand for regime change. 

However, the amorphous outburst of anger lacked leadership or organisational network, and the protests petered out after a brutal crackdown in which thousands of lives were lost. That said, the reservoir of discontent and anger exacerbated by the US and Israel still exists, and the brutal State repression has left deep scars. It is anybody's guess what the people’s reaction will be if there is a US attack.

Conceivably, the nation will rally to protect the country. Iranians do not expect the cavalry to come in from Moscow or Beijing to rescue them. Iranians realise they are on their own at the present juncture of geopolitical realignments. Nonetheless, Iran’s capacity to inflict high costs on any aggressor will not be lost on Trump and, two, Iran is banking on Trump’s unwillingness to take punishment.

Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev framed the paradigm accurately when he said last weekend that the chaos that surrounds Trump’s actions conceals, in reality, a carefully thought-out policy. 

Medvedev said, “As a former businessman — and there are no truly former businessmen, just as there are some other things that are never truly ‘former’ — he [Trump] always acts forcefully: ‘I will scare you, then step back, and you will agree to half of my terms’… this is quite effective — in relations with the UK, with other European countries, and with many other countries as well.”

Seymour Hersh noted in Substack with an eye on the midterms in November that “anxiety in the White House that both the House and the Senate might fall to the Democrats is acute.” Trump is desperately soliciting a credible offer to back away.

Typically, Benjamin Netanyahu has vanished from the centre stage. Instead, the US Ambassador to NATO Matt Whitaker, a Republican from the key State of Iowa and a political associate of the President, has stepped in to signal that Trump has made clear demands of Iran, and what happens next will be up to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. 

Whitaker was as much speaking for the MAGA audience as to signal to Tehran when he told Fox News’ ‘The Big Weekend Show’ that, “The President has been very clear on Iran... you can't have a nuclear weapon, and you need to stop killing protesters in your streets. That’s a pretty clear red line.”

Whitaker described the "armada that is sitting off the coast of Iran as both a show of strength and an ‘off ramp’ ”. He said Iranians "could de-escalate very easily and simply" by abandoning nuclear ambitions and halting the suppression of protests. He emphasised that Trump's aim is not to destabilise Iran. 

Meanwhile, on Saturday, Trump himself said he believes Tehran is negotiating "seriously", and that he hopes an "acceptable" deal can be brokered.

Iranians take immense pride in their civilisation state, and rightly so. The last thing they want is a fragmentation of their country, as happened to Lebanon, Libya, or Syria.

M K Bhadrakumar is a former diplomat.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH).