Although the scenario of military escalation that prevailed for days after the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani has faded away, we cannot safely say that the spectre of a proxy war between the mullahs’ regime and America has totally left the stage of the conflict.
The willingness of the parties to the crisis, the mullahs in Iran and the US White House, to avoid war is not entirely sufficient to end the expectations of war because other hardliners are capable of triggering a major crisis that could lead both sides to wage a war they do not want. At the forefront of these parties, of course, are the hardliners of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and its militias deployed on the Middle East chessboard.
It is true that the leaders of these militias follow the orders of the heads of the guards. But there is still work to be done to improve the conditions for a possible negotiation.
Moreover, miscalculations are possible in the dynamics of the work of these irregular militias, which sometimes operate in certain circumstances and for certain purposes outside the systems of control and hierarchy to which they are subject.
A careful reading of the details of the current scene of the Iranian-American conflict allows us to say that negotiation is still the most likely future possibility. It is the cheapest option and the one that is most in line with the interests of both sides in the crisis, after both sides have obtained what they wanted at the military level, without taking into account the objective and specialized evaluation of what has been obtained.
President Trump’s assassination of General Soleimani demonstrates his ability to take the difficult decision to deter the Iranian regime, avoiding a continuing political loophole that his opponents exploit by talking about his administration of the Iranian issue. He has succeeded in doing so to a large extent.
On the other hand, the mullahs avoided a serious US military attack and escaped the catastrophic repercussions of the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani in case they risked an ill-considered military response to the US attack. They chose a calculated response that was neither proportional to the Iranian reactions nor to the expectations of the Iranian people. But the response was in line with the mullahs’ regime’s priorities and their extreme pragmatism, which places the regime’s interests, its survival and maintenance above all other considerations.
Both sides in the crisis that threatened the Middle East after the assassination of Soleimani were well aware of the need to accelerate the return to the implicitly agreed rules of the game.
The mullahs realized that they had violated these rules by targeting the American embassy in an act that touched upon a bad historical memory of the American political spirit. They did not realize that President Trump could not allow his rule to be linked to the repeated siege of a US Embassy by the Iranians. The discussions of the Iranian National Security Council led by the Supreme Leader (for the first time) helped to slow down the rush and to identify mistakes and priorities with great precision and realism. The regime has chosen a calculated military response to save face, focusing on a political path based on the idea of withdrawing US forces from Iraq. This is also a way to save face.
Achieving this goal is likely to be difficult in the foreseeable future, as it has negative repercussions that have a serious impact on the US. I am convinced that much of what is happening in the area of Iranian-American relations at this stage is still aimed at improving the conditions for negotiations and strengthening the negotiating position, especially on the part of the Iranian regime.
The Iranian regime is well aware that its main strength is due to a number of factors, including the great leeway it has in its vital regional area through the weapons of its sectarian militia. Its missile capabilities can be transformed into rocket/nuclear capabilities in record time.
The US strategy is currently focused on these two elements. The American strategy seeks to change the mullahs’ regime’s behavior at the regional level by stripping it of its regional and missile capabilities, or at least by limiting its capacity for movement and strategic expansion and undermining the sources of its threat, particularly to Israel, by expanding the scope of the nuclear deal to include the reduction of Iran’s missile capabilities.
Iran’ mullahs have bet on their ability to withstand the effects of the sanctions. Sanctions mainly affect the people and do not affect the regime much. The regime has devised a strategy to buy time until the end of President Trump’s presidential term in the hope that a new US president will come to return his country to the nuclear deal from which President Trump has withdrawn.
In the recent period, the mullahs have tried to add fuel to the fire and have sought to weaken President Trump’s position in the country and misunderstood his leadership mentality. They wanted to trigger embarrassing crises for him, such as the shooting down of the US Drone, and get involved in several operations targeting oil tankers, even the headquarters of the US Embassy in Baghdad and the targeting of US Military bases in Iraq.
Their accounts in all of this were separate from the accounts of the other side (President Trump). They left the president no choice but to risk the decision to kill General Soleimani to deter Iran and stop the acceleration of its hostile actions against his country.
True, President Trump may not have a suitable backdrop that would support a full-scale war against Iran, due in part to his conflict with the House of Representatives, the hesitant positions of his European NATO allies, and the rejection of war with Iran by Russia and China.
But even if open or all-out war is not among the military options of the US, lightning-fast surgical military strikes based on the superiority of American missiles are among them. President Trump made explicit reference to this when he talked about targeting Iranian cultural sites, and then quickly reconsidered the issue after finding that it contradicted international law.
But the message got through to the mullahs’ leadership and achieved its goal. The cultural symbols that President Trump was talking about may include most sites that may be even more important to the Iranian regime than military capabilities and facilities, including nuclear power plants themselves.
It seems that President Trump intended to convey this message to curb the mullahs’ madness of accelerated incitement against everything American in Iraq until General Soleimani was killed.
On the whole, the signals exchanged between the mullahs and America can be understood even in the most furious and emotional moments.
President Trump defends the decision to kill Soleimani and points out that he was “planning an attack on four American embassies,” and that Iran was planning to “bomb” the American embassy in Baghdad. Meanwhile, the US Special Representative for Iran, Brian Hook, was speaking in Brussels about Washington’s willingness to hold discussions on the Iranian issue. Hook said US President Donald Trump had announced the opening of new doors for US Diplomacy to negotiate the issue.
In addition, the Iranian delegate to the UN Majid Takht-Ravanchi raised the idea of dialogue, saying that the current US Administration is “not ready” for dialogue, given its “antagonism towards the Iranian people.”
These are small signals, but they show a mutual tendency to calm down and return to mutual sign language in order to sit at the negotiating table. Any postponement of this step does not mean the possibility of war as much as it means that the terms of the negotiations for one or both parties are still not favorable.
