The Trump administration on Monday announced the re-imposition of all sanctions waived under the 2015 Iran JCPOA nuclear agreement. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says that this action will meet a “crushing response.”
But will Iran really retaliate?
I think it’s unlikely. For a start, it’s not at all clear that the new sanctions will have a major effect. After all, the United States is the only nation that has actually agreed to reimpose sanctions. The absence of similar activity by the European powers, China, and Russia means that Iran can hope to avoid a total economic shutdown. The exception would be if the U.S. imposed secondary sanctions on companies from countries that continue to deal with Iran. But while that seems likely in relation to restored arms sales to Iran, I doubt the Trump administration will enforce all-sector secondary sanctions. That distinction matters. Of course, thanks to U.S. sanctions previously reimposed, Iran’s economy is already in dire straits.
The key here is politics.
Namely, U.S. politics. Desperate to see Joe Biden unseat President Trump, Iran is likely to wait for the outcome of the U.S. presidential election before reacting to any new sanctions. If Joe Biden wins, Iran can look forward to America’s return to the JCPOA and a corollary delivery of rapid sanctions relief. That would enable Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to consolidate the patronage networks which ensure his continued power and enable the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to reinvigorate their expansion of the revolution. The IRGC faction would also likely gamble that a Biden presidency, unlike a Trump presidency, would tolerate attacks on U.S. interests in Iraq, and against U.S. persons.
The IRGC took notice of the Obama administration’s sustained appeasement of their interests. Desperate to secure Iran’s support for the nuclear deal, President Barack Obama and, by association, Joe Biden, ignored even the most egregious of Iranian aggressions. For example, Qassem Soleimani’s 2011 plot to blow up a Washington, D.C., restaurant met only a U.S. judicial response. Iran’s particular threat under a Biden administration would be of an Iranian assassination campaign against U.S. officials, perhaps even up to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Iran believes it must avenge the January killing of IRGC Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a way that involves Americans of note. My fear is that the Iranians would believe that Biden would respond mildly to such an assassination. The IRGC will act with extreme aggression if it believes it can do so without suffering major consequences. President Biden would thus have to be clear that while he supports a renewed JCPOA, he would not tolerate Iranian terrorist attacks.
That takes us back to the issue of sanctions at this moment. Today, Iran’s fear of major consequences to any attack it carried out is why it is avoiding such attacks. Its leaders fear that any significant attack on U.S. interests would lead to even more robust American military action than that which killed Soleimani. If Biden wins come November, Iran will likely reassess that strategy.
