November 13, 2024

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Iran Will Factor Heavily in Trump’s Foreign Policy

AP Photo/Vahid Salemi

The second Trump administration will take office on January 20, 2025, amidst a foreign policy crisis involving Iran. Iran and Israel have each conducted strikes on each other’s territory twice during 2024 – crossing a red line that both states previously considered sacrosanct. Iran is, by several accounts, preparing another major attack on Israel to retaliate for Israel’s October 26, 2024, strikes on Iranian air defense and missile sites. Reports indicate Iran has been transferring missiles and armed drones to its Shia militia allies in Iraq to disguise the Iranian retaliation as an Iraqi attack, providing Tehran a measure of deniability. Israel has vowed that an attack, even if launched by pro-Iranian factions, would provoke a disproportional response against Iranian economic and possibly nuclear targets.

If implemented, an Israeli attack on that scale would only further escalate the post-October 7 regionwide clashes between Israel and the United States, on the one side, and Iran and its Axis of Resistance partners, including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthi movement, and Iraqi and Syrian militias, to all-out warfare. Whereas the threat from Islamic State (ISIS) consumed U.S. officials in the first Trump term, Iran and its Axis of Resistance are sure to occupy the top of the second Trump term Middle East agenda.

Not only will Trump’s return to office be confronted by regional conflagration involving Iran and its partners but also by an Iranian nuclear program that has expanded substantially since he left office in January 2021. Iran’s decision to steadily grow its stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium (only requiring modest further work to reach weapons-grade purity of 90 percent) has been attributed to the first Trump administration’s decision to exit the 2015 multilateral Iran nuclear agreement (JCPOA).

The JCPOA withdrawal was accompanied by Trump’s imposition of a “maximum pressure” policy on Tehran centered on strict enforcement of comprehensive, U.S.-led secondary sanctions on every sector of Iran’s economy, including its oil industry. By all accounts, the new administration plans to reinstate the maximum pressure policy, focusing on cutting off Iran’s oil sales as part of an aggressive strategy to undercut Tehran’s ability to fund its regional armed allies and its nuclear and missile programs. However, the maximum pressure policy applied in the first Trump administration did not accomplish those same objectives, and it is not clear that returning to the maximum pressure strategy will fare any better after 2025.

Iran has been able to advance its nuclear program even though U.S. officials have kept all aspects of the maximum pressure Iran sanctions architecture in place for the past four years. As Trump takes office, Iran is assessed as weeks from assembling enough fissile material for one nuclear weapon, if Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamene’i orders his team to move forward. Assembling the detonation mechanism for a nuclear bomb might require several months of additional experimentation. Further challenging the incoming U.S. administration have been recent statements, including from Kamal Kharrazi, a senior advisor to the Supreme Leader, that Israel’s recent attacks on Iran might prompt Iran’s leadership to decide to proceed with developing a nuclear arsenal.

During his campaign, President-elect Trump indicated he would have supported an Israeli decision to include Iranian nuclear sites in its October 26 counterstrike. His comments, and those of many of his associates, suggest the new administration would support Israel and the United States confronting the Iranian nuclear challenge militarily – even if doing so would run counter to Trump’s intent to de-escalate global conflicts. Perhaps in an effort to reassure the incoming U.S. foreign policy team that the Iran nuclear file can still be handled through negotiations, the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mariano Grossi, announced on Sunday he would visit Iran for technical discussions to implement a March 2023 joint Iran-IAEA agreement to expand inspections of Iran’s nuclear program.

Iran has also enhanced its cyber-attack capabilities and its cooperation with criminal networks. Three days after Trump’s re-election, the U.S. Department of Justice said the FBI had thwarted an Iranian plot to assassinate Trump before the election. Iran has allegedly also plotted to kill Iranian dissidents living in the United States and Europe, as well as Trump first term officials responsible for the maximum pressure policy and the decision to strike and kill the revered Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – Qods Force (IRGC-QF) commander Qasem Soleimani in January 2020.

Yet, evolving global and regional geopolitics since the first Trump administration will undoubtedly complicate renewed Trump efforts to pressure Tehran. China, as did the other parties to the Iran nuclear agreement, opposed the U.S. exit from the accord in 2018 and did not reimpose sanctions on Tehran. Since then, China - despite U.S. sanctions still in place that penalize the purchase of Iranian oil - has bought progressively increasing volumes of Iranian oil, reaching a peak of nearly 2 million barrels per day in September. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the new Trump administration would move quickly to choke off Iran’s oil income by threatening to sanction foreign ports, particularly those in China, and traders who handle Iranian oil. Yet, the most optimistic assessments suggest these steps would only reduce Iran’s oil exports by 30 percent. Under that scenario, Iran’s oil export volumes would not fall even close to the nearly zero level reached when global compliance with Iran sanctions was at its height in 2013-2015, or the 250,000 barrels per day exported by Iran during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Any effort by the Trump administration to try to reduce China’s sales of Iranian oil will inevitably become intertwined with - and complicated by - a range of other bilateral U.S.-China issues including trade, tariffs, East Asian security, intellectual property protection, and other issues.

Since 2021, Iran has developed close relations with Russia, based largely on Tehran’s agreement to supply Moscow with sophisticated armed drones used against Ukraine and their continued cooperation to secure the Assad regime in Syria. Whereas Russia supported U.S. and European efforts to compel Iran to limit its nuclear program a decade ago, Russia no longer supports multilateral pressure on Iran’s nuclear program. In recent years, Russia and China have recruited Iran into several multilateral organizations, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS, that can help Iran mitigate the effects of intensified U.S. sanctions. Moreover, the Arab Gulf states have all improved ties with Iran since Trump left office in 2021. They all seek to de-escalate several regional conflicts involving Iran and its various Axis partners. Gulf leaders have expressed concern that the ongoing conflict between Iran and Israel might spill over into the Gulf region and derail their efforts to focus on economic diversification.

On the other hand, the next Trump administration can expect increased support from European leaders for pressuring Tehran economically. European leaders have hardened their policies toward Iran in response to its assistance to Moscow’s war effort in Ukraine. Some European leaders support a “snap back” of all UN sanctions on Iran in accordance with provisions of UN Security Council Resolution 2231 that enshrined the JCPOA in international law. U.S. officials have, to date, urged European leaders not to proceed with a snap back of sanctions, hoping to enlist Tehran’s cooperation in regional de-escalation. The incoming Trump administration is likely to support a snap back, perceiving doing so would add leverage to Washington’s effort to compel Beijing, Moscow, and other capitals to sanction Iran. Many experts assess that broad cooperation with U.S. sanctions on Iran could propel Tehran to undertake negotiations with Trump officials in search of a broad agreement on major outstanding issues – a deal the president-elect has said he would strongly entertain.