How Biden miscalculated on Iran

[Camela Whorris]

Biden guessed wrong. As the devastating Oct. 7 Hamas attack on
Israel demonstrates, Iran remains a virulent and murderous presence
in the Middle East. The level of Iran’s direct involvement in the
attack remains unclear, but Iran is the Hamas group’s primary backer
and strategic overlord. “It is inconceivable that Hamas undertook an
attack of this magnitude and complexity without some foreknowledge
and affirmative support from Iran’s leadership,” Suzanne Maloney,
director of the Brookings Institution’s foreign policy program,
wrote in Foreign Affairs on Oct. 10.

Iran and the escalating war between Israel, Hamas, and perhaps other
Palestinian groups will now dominate the months leading up to the
2024 presidential election. Biden first has to answer critics who
say he went soft on Iran and indirectly enabled the Hamas attack.
There could also be new upward pressure on oil prices as the United
States faces inevitable calls to reverse recent engagement efforts
with Iran — the world’s seventh-largest oil producer — and apply
maximum sanctions. And Iran’s willingness to ignite a new Middle
East war will now draw attention away from other Biden priorities
and suck more US resources into a region Biden was trying to pivot
away from.

Trumpers and other Biden critics should can any schadenfreude. Iran
has bedeviled nearly every US president since its Islamic Revolution
in 1979, and anybody peddling simple-sounding ways to contain the
so-called Islamist republic is playing video games, not practicing
geopolitics. Bombing or invading Iran would produce a horrifying
conflagration. Aggressive sanctions always disappoint. Trying to
foment a coup would be folly.

The short history of the current standoff with Iran dates to 2002,
when it became publicly known that Iran was developing a nuclear
weapons program. A variety of US and international sanctions
followed, many of them focused on punishing Iran by curtailing oil
exports and the development of Iran’s oil deposits, which are the
third largest in the world.


President Trump, opposed to basically everything Obama did, revoked
US involvement in the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, while reimposing
many of the sanctions Obama eased. Iran adopted a "resistance
economy" meant to find ways around US sanctions, and resumed work on
its nuclear program. Experts now think Iran has enough bomb-grade
nuclear material to assemble a nuke within a couple of weeks if it
chooses to do so. Trump’s contention that tougher sanctions would
disrupt Iran’s nuclear program was wrong.

When Biden took office in 2021, he tried to restart the Obama-era
nuclear deal. But the genie was out of the bottle and it didn’t
work. After Russia invaded Ukraine early in 2022, the Biden team
undertook some sly diplomacy with Iran. “The Biden administration
has been engaged in implementing a series of understandings with
Tehran to keep the Iran file off the president’s desk ahead of his
campaign for reelection,” Jason Brodsky of the Middle East Institute
wrote on Oct. 10.

Iran, under this arrangement, would do its part by discouraging its
various proxy militias from attacking US troops in Syria and Iraq.
It would also slow-roll its nuclear program, a bit. The United
States, in return, would overlook some Iranian oil sales, otherwise
subject to sanctions, which would have the added benefit of
increasing global supplies and tamping down oil and gasoline prices.

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iran-151553510.html