Iran Is Weak Right Now — The West Should Exploit That Weakness

-Analysis-

The Iranian regime is in a bind again, with an intensification of foreign pressures that are in turn fueling factional tensions at home. As mounting pressures could threaten the entire regime, the two main factions — broadly labeled “moderates” and “hardliners” — are again vying to impose their solution.

The hardliners want to “bunkerize” Iran along the lines of a state like North Korea (with which the regime has cordial relations) believing this is the way to stand up to the West, while the moderates believe the regime’s survival depends on engaging in some kind of dialogue with the Western world. It is a factional tug-of-war practically as old as the 45-year history of the Islamic Republic.

The country’s new foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, calls this dialogue “hostility management,” and that includes diplomacy to thwart domestic unrest, which the regime often blames on foreign provocations.

Indeed, Araghchi was likely chosen for his skills as a former nuclear dossier negotiator, given the regime’s anxiety over a possible change of administration in the United States. For both factions seem to agree on one thing: that the regime could face another bout of rioting or a national revolt similar to those of 2022, and that unrest is more easily quelled when there isn’t open conflict with the West.

The meaning of Zarif’s return

As the regime’s chief decision-taker, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei sits as an arbiter between the two sides. For three decades now, he has spoken in such a way as to allow both factions to interpret his words as they please. This ensures that no decision can be personally pinned on him. Thus he has sometimes spoken of the need to make a “tactical retreat” when necessary or to show “heroic flexibility,” while also often threatening “God’s wrath” against anyone who retreats before “the enemy.”

It’s an unending game of ambiguity designed to keep winning time and forestalling decisions.

In his first meeting with members of the government of President Masoud Pezeshkian, he told them not to “pin their hopes on the enemy” nor wait for their “approval” before deciding. His vague injunctions allowed the new ministers, chosen from both factions, to leave the meeting satisfied.

It’s an unending game of ambiguity designed to keep winning time and forestalling decisions. It keeps folk inside and abroad guessing, but can it go on just because it suits Iran’s leaders? Well, 30 years of dealing with the Tehran regime have shown that it can, even if Western states are now anxious to see it change its conduct, and significantly.

The political resurrection of the former foreign minister, Javad Zarif, suggests Iran is again ready for dialogue, even if this will consist of nothing more than vapid double-talk. The regime wants to buy time, and Zarif and Aragchi will haggle for it.

Trigger mechanism

The West began changing its tone with Iran with the election of the last president, the late Ibrahim Raisi, a foreign-policy hardliner. The stricter tone hasn’t changed with the new government, which is sold as pragmatic or competent but entirely loyal to Khamenei.

Western governments want Iran to change its conduct in several areas, even if none include the fundamental changes sought by millions of Iranians. What interests the West is almost exclusively Iran’s secretive nuclear program. Finally on May 28, after years of ineffectual threats, they had approved at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a resolution to curtail Iran’s continued uranium enrichment.

The European signatories to the 2015 nuclear pact, Britain, France and Germany, have managed to reactivate the trigger mechanism that could, if approved at the UN Security Council, re-impose all the sanctions Iran faced before the 2015 nuclear pact. This, should it occur, is unlikely to happen before early next year, after the next U.S. president is in office. Whatever the punitive measures it has in mind, the West is unlikely to allow Iran a free hand in a nuclear program that could, in theory, threaten the West and its ally Israel, and trigger panic across the Middle East.

Russia and China

Another priority for the West is curtailing Iran’s pernicious meddling in the Middle East. This too is decades old, though it took a critical turn with the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, which was partly a product of Iran’s aid to Hamas. The attack has provoked war and killed thousands including Hamas’s own political boss, recently blown up in Tehran. The Iranian regime says it will avenge his death, but is clearly reluctant to spark anything remotely resembling a war with Israel, as that could cause its collapse. The West too insists on avoiding another war, which is why it has resorted to its favored method of incremental sanctions.

The West is tiring of Iran’s game, where its harmful actions speak louder than any words.

The first of a new round of sanctions may have begun with the UK government’s expanded blacklist of undesirables including members of the Revolutionary Guards’ Unit 700, which engages in sabotage, trafficking and the like. The novelty here may be in the inclusion of regime elements suspected of aiding regional militias, rather than involvement in torture inside Iran or involvement in the nuclear program. It might also indicate that the West is tiring of Iran’s game, where its harmful actions speak louder than any words.

Iran’s close affiliation with the anti-Western axis and decision to arm Russia against Ukraine, are further factors affecting the West’s changing approach. Beyond Russia, the West is likely concerned with China’s growing regional presence and physical proximity to the world’s oil and gas reserves. Thanks to its 25-year megadeal with China and its secret clauses, Islamic Iran is effectively acting as communist China’s janitor in the Persian Gulf.

For now, in the Middle East as in Ukraine, the West is responding with what is frankly an incomprehensible level of moderation and patience to situations that threaten its vital interests.