In the first lesson on writing vague press releases at communications schools, they should study Iran’s behavior since Israel’s attack on Friday. In three waves, the attack mainly hit Iran’s air defenses and ballistic missile production capabilities, as a response to Iran’s missile attack on Israel earlier this month.
The regime of the Ayatollahs, with all its communications arms, has been saying a lot, and yet nothing, about its decision whether to react to Israel’s reaction. The bottom line, therefore, is that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his people are leaving themselves a ladder to climb down, in order to halt the succession of blows, and are putting the matter into "storage".
They are putting it into storage and not throwing it into the garbage, because their eyes are on November 5, and the contest for the presidency of the US between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, who abandoned the international nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018 and sanctioned the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. Commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, two years later.
The administration of President Joe Biden will go down in history as favorable to Israel, and as having stood by it when it was in need of a real friend. Nevertheless, several recent events have given an indication of Harris’s personal stance, for example when she responded to a heckler wearing a keffiyeh who accused her of investing billions of dollars in genocide in Gaza by saying, "What he’s talking about, it’s real."
An important goal of the Biden administration, including Harris, was to bring Iran into a revamped nuclear agreement, a mission in which it failed utterly. According to a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency two months ago, as revealed by Reuters, Iran has reached 164.7 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium.
The agency estimates that Iran is short of only two kilograms to reach a theoretical quantity that, if it is enriched further, will be sufficient for four nuclear bombs. Harris, if she is elected, can be expected to continue the policy of trying to bring Iran into a renewed agreement, as the existing Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action of 2015, from which the US withdrew, is no longer relevant, both in its timetable and in relation to the current state of Iran’s nuclear program.
Trump, on the other hand, is an enigma. When he was president, he did pursue a very aggressive policy on Iran, but in a second term he can be expected to look towards his long-term legacy. As president, he led the formation of the Abraham Accords, which broke the prevailing concept of territory for peace or normalization in return for significant benefits for the Palestinians.
If he wins a second term, Trump’s behavior towards the regime of the Ayatollahs and the nuclear agreement could go either way: renewal of agreements designed to halt progress on Iran’s nuclear program, or substantive threats to the point of an attack on Iran’s nuclear installations.
Unlike Israel, the US is capable of destroying those installations, even the most fortified of them. On that, the Biden administration sent a signal to Iran last week, when it attacked the Houthi rebels in Yemen using B2 Spirit aircraft costing $2 billion each, that can carry munitions designed to destroy underground targets.
The message of that attack is that the US will not hesitate to deploy its stealth bombers in the Middle East as necessary to drop bunker-busting bombs, a capability that Israel doesn’t possess. Trump could take that a step further, but, as mentioned, in his case it’s hard to make predictions.
During the time that Israel’s reaction to the Iranian attack was awaited, the former president reversed the trend in the opinion polls, which now veer between a dead heat and a slight advantage to him. As in his contest with Hilary Clinton in 2016, which, because of the electoral college system, he won despite receiving fewer votes overall, the result this November is likely to depend on the last of the electors. Any one of the swing states could determine the destiny of the US for the next four years.
The Middle East is not the foremost issue in the US election, but it is undoubtedly important to very important. The Iranians know that a hasty reaction to Israel’s operation will hurt the chances of Harris, whom they prefer, and will make progress on negotiations on a ceasefire with Hamas and Hezbollah and a deal for the return of the Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip difficult. Such a deal would greatly assist Harris if it were to happen soon.
Either way, between November 6 and the swearing in of the next US president in January there will be a twilight period that will be very dangerous for the Middle East at such a fraught time. It’s hard to predict how President Biden, who will no longer be constrained by election considerations, will behave, and equally hard to predict how Iran will behave if Trump wins. At any rate, after sustaining a severe blow to its air defense system and its ballistic missiles, the Islamic Republic is not expected to attack Israel with the same force as on October 1, at least not until the US election is over.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on October 27, 2024.
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