Trump, Obama… and the Iranian Trap
Which Donald Trump are we to believe, the one who understands, in his bones, what Iran represents under the regime established in 1979, or the one who seems to have drifted toward the illusions of Barack Obama, who was convinced that Tehran held the keys to every regional crisis and that its nuclear file contained them all? Obama went so far as to persuade himself that radical Shia Islam, embodied by the Revolutionary Guards and their proxies across the region, was fundamentally different from radical Sunni Islam, as represented by Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and before as after them, the Muslim Brotherhood. He never grasped that religious fanaticism, in whatever form it takes, Christian, Islamic, Jewish, or Hindu, amounts to nothing more than different faces of the same coin.
Trump's behavior over the past few days has given the impression of a man gripped by indecision. The American president appeared to be leaning, at least outwardly, toward a lopsided deal with a regime that is seeking to recapture the initiative in the region after discovering a new weapon: the Strait of Hormuz. All signs suggest that within the American administration, certain voices are pushing for an arrangement with the Iranian regime centered on reopening the strait, to be presented afterward as a personal victory for Donald Trump.
The Iranian file is, admittedly, of extreme complexity, all the more so since Tehran has found this new card to play after having long relied on its nuclear program as the regime's first line of defense.
What, then, will the American president do in the days and weeks ahead, as he continues to speak incessantly of “progress” in the negotiations with Iran, and even of the possibility of a meeting with “Supreme Leader” Mojtaba Khamenei, whose true state of health few people know, and whose actual capacity to govern the Islamic Republic remains, at a more fundamental level, an open question?
The American president's talk of a possible “memorandum of understanding” with Iran is cause for serious concern at a time when the Islamic Republic has by no means abandoned its aggression toward neighboring states. The two most recent attacks against Kuwait and Bahrain have laid bare both Tehran's persistent belligerence and its inability to strike directly at the United States and Israel. None of this has been enough to prompt an American reassessment of the futility of any agreement with an Iran that deliberately targeted civilians at a Kuwaiti airport, so long as it has not renounced its expansionist project, a project it has still not accepted is now running into a dead end.
Certainly, no Lebanese can do other than thank Trump for intervening to dissuade Benjamin Netanyahu from launching a new offensive on the southern suburbs of Beirut, with all the additional destruction that would have visited upon a Lebanese district adjoining the capital, without meaningfully affecting Hezbollah's military capabilities. But such an initiative on the part of the American president will carry little real weight as long as he has not adopted a clear position on the Iranian expansionist project as a whole. One cannot deal with the Islamic Republic piecemeal, in the manner of Barack Obama, who did everything in his power to placate the Iranian regime in the hope of reaching a nuclear agreement in July 2015, just months before the end of his presidency and the first arrival of Donald Trump at the White House.
In the period leading up to the signing of that agreement between the Islamic Republic and the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany, the Obama administration spared no effort to shield Tehran from the slightest irritation. It was in this spirit that Obama refrained in the summer of 2013 from striking Syria to bring down the minority regime that had just turned chemical weapons against its own people. The former president forgot his promises and the “red line” he had himself drawn for Bashar al-Assad. Overnight, he stopped seeing the color red — every other color remained visible, but not that one.
Donald Trump, from the moment he arrived at the White House in early 2017, had nonetheless demonstrated a deep understanding of what Iran represents as a regime. He tore up the nuclear agreement in 2018, calling it “the worst of its kind”. In early 2020, shortly before the end of his first term, he gave the green light for the elimination of Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force within the Revolutionary Guards, then regarded as the most influential Iranian figure after the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. That assassination, which came shortly after Soleimani had left Baghdad airport, having arrived from Damascus following a meeting in Beirut with Hassan Nasrallah, bore witness to an intimate knowledge of Iran, the architecture of its regime, and the pivotal role that a figure like Soleimani played both inside the country and across the region.
Everything the American president has accomplished since his return to the White House a year and a half ago attests to a thorough command of the Iranian file. This has included his participation in two wars against Iran alongside Israel. The first concluded in June of last year, following a campaign of strikes that hit Iranian nuclear installations. But has something changed in the American approach to the Islamic Republic and what it represents? Has Trump begun to engage with Iran on its own terms, under the influence of a Pakistani mediation that gives Tehran more time to maneuver?
A few days will suffice — a few weeks at most — to determine whether Trump is now prepared to fall into the Iranian trap by severing the nuclear file from the ballistic missiles and their launch platforms, from Iran's instruments of power in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, and from the Islamic Republic's general conduct toward its neighbors, particularly the six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
What is certain is that whether Trump changes course and begins dealing with Iran piecemeal — or does not change at all — Lebanon will pay a heavy price on account of Hezbollah's arsenal. For the one constant in the Israeli-American relationship remains that stubborn insistence on separating the Lebanese file from the Iranian one.