Trump and Iran by Nader Entessar;Kaveh L. Afrasiabi;

Author:Nader Entessar;Kaveh L. Afrasiabi; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing

Chapter 5

The Regional Dimension

The proponents of Trump’s aggressive Iran policy have often used the word rollback to describe that policy. A Cold-War concept judiciously used by several US administrations against the Soviet Union, rollback in the Iranian context has an offensive connotation conveying a strategy not merely to contain Iranian power but rather to significantly reduce it and to reverse the momentum for Iran’s “expansionism” presumably generated by the nuclear accord. To reiterate, during the Obama era, rollback was used in a limited language that focused on rolling back Iran’s nuclear program that was perceived to be steadily progressing toward a nuclear bomb. A nuclear Iran, it was feared, would be able to project power and dominate its region, perhaps triggering a regional nuclear arms race destabilizing the oil-rich Persian Gulf region. The nuclear prioritization of the Obama administration was met with approval by the regional allies of the United States, above all Israel and Saudi Arabia, albeit with a growing apprehension that the final deal was sub-optimal and, worse, created new opportunities for Iran’s “hegemonic aspirations” throughout the Middle East. Obama was faulted, rightly or wrongly, for facilitating Iran’s hegemony by inking a defective nuclear arms agreement that failed to cover the non-nuclear issues of concern to the United States and its allies in the Middle East. This perceived defect was corrected in the new US National Security Strategy of 2017 that defined counter-hegemony as a top priority: “The United States must prevent the emergence of a hegemon in Europe, Northeast Asia, or the Middle East. A rival could utilize the region’s power potential to endanger U.S. territory or block U.S. commerce. A hegemon in the Middle East, for example, could endanger energy flows, raising the global price of key commodities, which would, in turn, harm the U.S. Economy.”1 Attaching this label to Iran, the Trump administration identified Iran as “the single most enduring threat to stability and peace in the Middle East.”2 This (Iran-centric) threat assessment jettisoned the hopeful expectations that with the signing of the JCPOA Iran’s “rogue” external behavior would improve in parallel to the economic reintegration of the country in the world economy. In his 2014 interview with the New Yorker, Obama had fueled those expectations by raising the prospect of an “equilibrium” between the Sunni Saudi-led bloc and the Shiite Iran-led bloc “if we were able to get Iran to cooperate in a responsible fashion.”3 US intelligence agencies’ assessment was that in the post-JCPOA context, Iran continued its “sphere of influence” politics tightly connected to the proliferation of its missile program in places such as Lebanon and Yemen. In Yemen, Iran was accused of facilitating the Houthi missile strikes at Saudi targets.4 A December 8, 2017, report by the UN Secretary-General on implementation of Resolution 2231 generally supported those allegations as well as allegations that Iran had shipped other weapons to the Houthis. US Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, cited that report in a December 14, 2017, presentation to the Security Council that asserted definitively that Iran had given the Houthis the missiles fired on Riyadh.

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