The election of Donald Trump to a second term in office certainly sounds like good news for Israel and correspondingly bad news for Iran.
Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump made clear not just his unwavering support for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but his willingness to go further than President Joe Biden in striking Tehran’s mullahs where it hurts.
Trump has always believed in ‘maximum pressure’ to force Iran to drop its nuclear program and abandon its support of terrorist proxies on Israel’s border.
The latest attempt on his own life by the Iranian regime will have done nothing to ease his mood.
On Friday, the Justice Department announced federal charges against a 51-year-old Afghan, Farhad Shakeri, claiming that, in September, Tehran ordered him to mount a surveillance operation on Trump with a view to assassinating him.
No wonder some believe Trump and Netanyahu – who have shared three phone calls already since the election last week – are now cooking up a major act of vengeance against Tehran.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump have already had three conversations since Trump’s election victory last week.
Trump has always believed in ‘maximum pressure’ to force Iran to drop its nuclear program and abandon support of terrorist proxies. (Pictured: aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea, close to both Israel and Iran.)
Pressure for military action against Iran is growing and President-elect Trump is thought to be sympathetic. (Pictured: smoke billowing from an Israeli attack on a target in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon.)
Despite demands for bombing raids against Israel’s nuclear facilities a, it is more likely that Trump will crack down on Iran’s illicit oil sales. Here an Iranian-flagged tanker (right) is caught transferring oil to a Cameroon-flagged tanker to disguise its origin.
Indeed, there have been growing calls in recent months for strikes on Iran’s vital oil infrastructure and, in particular, for bombing raids on its nuclear plants, which are thought to be dangerously close to developing a viable bomb.
Yet I wonder if those repeated Trump-Netanyahu phone calls might be a sign of something else instead – that, perhaps, the US President-elect is a little reluctant.
And that, however, keen he is to support Israel – a non-negotiable priority – and damage Iran, Trump prefers to play a longer, less obviously confrontational game.
After all, he now has a whole range of geopolitical concerns to weigh. And not all of them in the Middle East.
Consider this: immediately after Iran’s missile attack on Israel on October 1, the US State Department added an obscure Indian shipping firm, Gabbaro, to its sanctions list.
Why? Because Gabbaro has been a key organiser in a fleet of ‘ghost tankers’ that quietly load Iranian oil in the Persian Gulf before re-labelling it for onward sale to India and China – but also to Western European countries and to US allies in Asia such as Japan and South Korea.
Gabbaro and others like it have been sanction busting on an epic scale. Without them, both Iran and Russia – also sanctioned by the US, of course – would be in difficulty, particularly Iran.
By laundering banned oil, these shadowy traders get around Washington’s effort to use what Trump described as the ‘toughest sanctions’ ever when he imposed them on Tehran in 2020.
Shadowy or not, continuing oil sales are crucial to Iran’s ailing economy, which is already hit by 35 percent inflation and a collapsing currency.
It would not take much to force a real crisis for an authoritarian regime already unpopular with its young population.
That’s why it is black market oil sales rather than, say, Iran’s nuclear facilities, that are likely to be in Trump’s crosshairs when he assumes office in the new year.
Certainly, squeezing Iranian oil exports was a key policy during his first term in office and we can expect it to be so again.
Indeed, one of Trump’s first decisions after re-election was to put Brian Hook in charge of recruiting personnel to run the State Department.
Hook was Trump’s point-man for Iran until 2020, personally architecting the severe sanctions against the mullahs and the secondary sanctions on anyone tempted to make a fast buck by dealing in Iranian oil.
But Trump will now have other ways of hurting Iran, too. Sabotage, for example.
Israel has already shown how cyber-warfare can disrupt Iran’s nuclear programs when it unleashed the devastating Stuxnet virus, discovered in 2010.
An Israeli airstrike hit this military facility near Tehran in October taking out a building that had once belonged to Iran’s nuclear weapons development program.
Iran attacked Israel with ballistic missiles in October, prompting calls for a dramatic response from Israel and the US.
Mysterious fires and explosions have also damaged nuclear and military sites in recent years, and scientists have been quietly assassinated.
Washington might even revert to the Cold War-style funding of guerrilla groups inside Iran, including those that want their regions to break away from the regime. These include the Kurds in the north-west, Arabs in the oil-rich south and the Balochis on the Pakistan border.
The Balochis have been waging a stubborn guerrilla war for years in the south-east of Iran, an additional source of expense and bloodshed that Tehran can ill afford.
Iran’s Kurds, meanwhile, see the autonomy enjoyed by their Iraqi kinsmen and could perhaps be persuaded – with sufficient backing – to take up arms themselves against Iran.
Yet the most effective move of all for Washington and others hoping to hoping to constrain the mullahs is to push other countries into pressuring on Iran.
Under Biden, Iran’s ayatollahs found vital economic lifelines courtesy of India, Russia and China. Trump will want to cut them.
However warm relations are right now, New Delhi, Moscow and Beijing see Tehran as no more than a pawn on the international chessboard. It is disposable.
Iran can be played – or sacrificed – whichever way they choose, either to complicate matters for Washington or buy their way back into Trump’s good books.
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, was notably quick to congratulate Trump on his election victory last week and shares many of the President-elect’s political characteristics.
Modi could easily put an end to India’s trade in Iranian oil through companies such as Gabbaro. In fact, the value to India of Iranian crude is dwarfed by its massive importation and – equally shadowy – re-export of Russian oil to China and Japan.
Russia currently provides 40 percent of India’s oil imports, a proportion that is rising by some ten percent a year.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin could cut Iran adrift if, as seems likely, Trump effectively brings the conflict in Ukraine to a close by refusing to continue supplying Kyiv with weaponry. Moscow would have no further need of Tehran’s drone technology.
And don’t forget how close Trump grew to Saudi ruler Crown Prince Mohammed in his first presidency, a move Iran will have watched with alarm.
Keeping the Gulf Arab monarchies secure – and well supplied with US weaponry – is another good way of reining in Iran.
There’s been a peculiar pathology to America and Iran ever since a CIA-backed coup put the Shah back on his throne in 1953. Ayatollah Khomeini’s overthrow of the Shah in 1979 was as much an anti-American revolution as an Islamic one.
Americans felt spurned by a country that they had long sponsored as a key ally in the Middle East – particularly when 52 Americans were seized by Iranian militants in November 1980 and held for more than year. Trump belongs to a generation scarred by the hostage crisis.
In the 45 years since, Iran’s terror-masters have exported the ‘Islamic revolution’ abroad, providing cash and weapons to anti-American and anti-Israeli groups across the Middle East. To America, the continued survival of the Ayatollahs’ regime is a standing reproach.
Whatever Trump’s personal animus towards a nation that clearly wants him dead, you can be sure his foreign policy on Iran will fit a wider agenda – which is to divide his rivals and restore America’s place as top dog.
Trump will certainly take pleasure in crippling the Ayatollahs’ ability to sponsor terrorism or make an atom bomb – but I doubt he’ll risk an invasion.
Nor does it yet seem likely that he would support the sort of complex bombing raids required to attack Iran’s nuclear centrifuges.
And why should he if he can get his way without going to the trouble?
Israel welcomed Trump’s victory, believing he will take a harder line against its opponents, including Iran. This billboard was seen on the side of a building in Jerusalem.
Iranians celebrate the launch of a major drone strike against Israel in April.
Donald Trump is a paradoxical politician. He showed great ruthlessness when he assassinated the Iranian master strategist, General Qasem Soleimani, in Baghdad in 2020, yet I’m told Trump vetoed Pentagon plans for raids on Iran which might have cost civilian lives.
He campaigned, remember, as a president who would restore American power and yet bring peace at the same time.
Trump is well aware that his coalition of voters rejected so-called ‘forever wars’. They don’t want to see body bags.
And by pressing down on Iran’s inflation-hit economy, cutting its supply of dollars, Trump could precipitate a crisis for the Ayatollahs without firing a shot.
Idealists and moralists will no doubt be dismayed by a Trump II foreign policy. Yet a fearless deal maker might well get better results for America – and for ordinary Iranians – than a pious determination to stand on principle.
Where has that got us?
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