Israeli intelligence officers likely will continue to conduct daring operations against Iran as “uncertainty” about American policy under a Biden administration and fear of Tehran’s aggression grows, according to U.S. officials and analysts.
“If you look at this as a country the way Israel does, you never know who is going to be the president four years down the road,” State Department special representative Elliot Abrams, the lead U.S. official for Iran, told the Washington Examiner. “But they’ve got to do defense planning now for themselves, and so do the other countries of the region, because it’s easier to predict what the Iranian regime is going to be like in 2024.”
That planning produced a landmark agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, subsequent U.S. approval of the Emiratis’ long-standing desire to purchase F-35 stealth fighter jets, and a string of apparent covert actions in Iran that culminated in the assassination of the regime’s top nuclear scientist last week. Those successes introduce a volatile new dynamic into President-elect Joe Biden’s attempt to jump-start negotiations over the restoration of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that Trump scrapped.
“The odds of the Biden administration getting the Israelis to cease-and-desist is very small,” former CIA operative Reuel Marc Gerecht, an analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Washington Examiner. “In the discrepancy here in analysis and threat is just too great.”
A continuation of such operations raises an array of possibilities. The severity of Iran’s vulnerability to such intelligence operations was made clear last week, not simply through the fact of the assassination of top scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, but through the timing — just two days before the 10th anniversary of the assassination of another Iranian nuclear scientist, Majid Shahriari.
“This idea that they can kill these people on anniversaries of previous assassinations … they can pick religious holidays, is very upsetting to the inside of the Iranian defense establishment,” Institute for Science and International Security President David Albright said Thursday on an American Enterprise Institute podcast.
The threat of additional attacks might spur Iran to negotiate with Biden, even provide the incoming U.S. president with leverage in the talks, if Tehran foresees that Biden’s team would pressure Israel to halt such operations.
“They have to worry a great deal about the next, in a sense, shot or explosion, and they know that if they start negotiations, probably that country will not do those kinds of explosions for assassinations,” Albright said. “These actions can act to encourage the Iranians to accept negotiations in lieu of retaliation.”
That’s one possible reading of the future. On the other hand, according to a former American official who was stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran prior to the revolution that brought the radical Shiite regime to power, Iran might regard retaliation as a way to spook Biden into making extra concessions in a race to defuse a brewing crisis.
“If Iran can find the right action, confronting the United States with a more active threat could actually increase the possibility of negotiation — provided the threat doesn’t go too far,” the Center for Strategic and International Studies’s strategy expert, Anthony Cordesman, said. “That’s part of the problem here: You don’t have, short of mind-reading, a clear understanding of risk perceptions in terms of each side.”
That ambiguity leaves each country in the position of playing a multilateral game of chicken, in which no player can be certain about whether aggression or conciliation is more likely to breed conflict or stability. And the perception that the U.S. (under Barack Obama, President Trump, and soon Biden) is more interested in confronting China than dealing with problems in the Middle East only aggravates that dynamic.
“The thrust of where America is going in the Middle East runs directly counter to what is required to assuage fear and concern about the Iranian nuclear program and about, you know, America’s real seriousness,” Gerecht said. “I think there are just too many contradictions here. When there are that many contradictions in the Middle East, I think it’s enfeebling.”
Abrams agreed, saying that “uncertainty about the commitment of the United States over time” contributed to the signing of the Abraham Accords as well as “unofficial” Arab-Israeli ties designed to counter Iran. “They take action individually and together combat that danger, and, obviously, they hope the United States sees it the same way,” he said.
The aggressiveness of Arab and Israeli operations might create an incentive for Biden to negotiate a stiffer deal than Obama’s team managed to achieve, if only to mitigate the risk of an explosion that derails a pact that fails to instill confidence in Israel or the Gulf Arab states.
“Things have been happening — these kind of below the surface of a military conflict of explosions of nuclear sites and assassinations that have ramped up the leverage, in a sense, even more,” Albright said. “It also shows that if the people in the region are not included in a deal, they may do things on their own that may not be in the interest of the Biden administration but may very well be in their interests.”
The memory of their disappointment with then-Secretary of State John Kerry’s performance during the previous negotiations raises that likelihood, suggested Abrams.
“They’re going to take whatever steps they take they need to protect themselves,” he said, referring at first to Israel and then broadening his focus to include the Gulf Arabs. “We didn’t pay any attention to them. That’s one of the things that I really hope happens if there is a negotiation, or any negotiation, next year. I hope that the people who live closest to Iran get a voice, which didn’t happen in 2015.”
