Sanctions on Iran just first step - Trump
US has ‘punishing’ strategy to force Tehran to pull back
US President Donald Trump has put Iran on notice that the punishing sanctions he plans to impose on Monday are just the opening salvo of a strategy to compel Tehran to pull back from its assertive posture in the Middle East or risk collapse.
“Our objective is to force the regime into a clear choice either abandon its destructive behaviour or continue down the path towards economic disaster,” Trump said in a statement on Friday night.
The guiding assumption behind the administration’s policy is that Iran is economically weak, has little interest in a military confrontation with the US and that Washington can force changes in decades-long Iranian behaviour that will reconfigure the Middle East, officials and experts say.
However, senior Iranian officials insist Tehran will neither retrench nor negotiate. Former US officials with long experience say Tehran has cards to play, including trying to ride out the sanctions in the hope that Trump is a one-term president and taking advantage of the continued turmoil in the region to stir up fresh challenges for the US and its allies.
“Iran is gaining ground in the region, and I don’t see these sanctions as reversing that,” said Jeffrey Feltman, who was the top state department official on Middle East issues from 2009 to 2012, and later served as a UN undersecretary-general for political affairs.
An early test of the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign will come in Syria. The White House has sought Russian President Vladimir Putin’s help in prodding Iranian forces and the Shiite militias Tehran backs to leave the country so far, without success.
To drive home the point, US officials have released figures asserting that Iran’s annual tab for sustaining its Lebanese ally Hezbollah is about $700m, while Tehran has spent at least $16bn in recent years supporting its allies in Syria, Yemen and Iraq. Some former US officials say, however, that Iran’s support for the Assad regime and Hezbollah are top priorities Tehran will try to sustain at all cost. “They are heavily invested in Syria, and the IRGC is not going anywhere soon,” said Ryan Crocker, the veteran US diplomat, referring to Iran’s paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
In a meeting in October with Wall Street Journal reporters and editors, Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif portrayed Iran’s military presence in Syria as defensive and disputed the notion that its forces should withdraw. “We believe that if we do not fight IS [Islamic State] in Syria and Iraq, we will have to fight it in Iran,” Zarif said. “Our people recognise that.”
Iran’s nuclear activities are another area where the Trump administration’s strategy will be tested. Iran has rebuffed US demands that it accept constraints on its nuclear programme that are far more strin- gent than those imposed by the 2015 accord negotiated by the Obama administration and disowned by Trump.
At the same time, Iran has acceded to European appeals that it stick with the 2015 agreement, which Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China are trying to preserve.
But Zarif signalled that Tehran might relax its adherence to that accord if economic benefits it still expects to achieve from the agreement are not forthcoming. “We have the possibility of a partial reduction of our commitment,” Zarif said. “We will have to make that decision when the time comes.”
Such a move could add to the strains between Europe and Washington over how to deal with Iran’s nuclear capability.
“Their strategy as of now is the expectation that Trump will be weakened by the midterm elections and won’t be re-elected in 2020, essentially a waitand-see approach,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan think-tank. “But their economy is in bad shape, and the trend lines are only going to worsen,” he added.
“They may soon conclude they have more leverage by reconstituting their nuclear activities not by going from 0 to 100 but from 0 to 20.”
In an effort to persuade Iran to stick with the 2015 accord, the EU is moving towards establishing a special payment channel to maintain economic ties with Iran. But US treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Friday he did not expect the channel to be effective in the face of US pressure.
Iran also is expected to reactivate its long-developed capacity for evading sanctions, seeking to dodge the economic bullets coming from Washington. But the Trump administration has vowed to crack down.
In an August tweet, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei asserted that Iran would not challenge the US militarily.
WE BELIEVE IF WE DO NOT FIGHT ISLAMIC STATE IN SYRIA AND IRAQ, WE WILL HAVE TO FIGHT IT IN IRAN. OUR PEOPLE RECOGNISE THAT