Excellent analysis:

Arta Moeini

@ArtaMoeini

Tehran’s Costly Gambit: How Iran is Empowering Israel

The Middle East is fast approaching its breaking point, teetering on the edge of a regional war that could embroil the United States.

? When Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh was killed in Tehran during the Iranian presidential inauguration ceremonies, Iran vowed to retaliate strongly against Israel. Two months on, that response has still not arrived, and as @BarakRavid rightly reports in @axios, Tehran has been “reluctant” to join the fight in Lebanon. Why? 

Here are some brief observations to help unpack the Iranian calculus with regard to ??????:

1) Iran’s failure to respond to the Haniyeh assassination promptly was a huge strategic mistake. The delay/inaction invited more emboldened action by Israel against Iranian assets and proxies in the region, further eroding Tehran’s deterrence against Israel. 

2) This so-called “strategic patience” has also diminished Iran’s strategic posture and symbolic power across the region while undermining its reputation and reliability in the eyes of its allies & partners.

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3) Israel has pushed its advantage and capitalized on this critical error, allowing it to project escalation dominance, especially in and around neighboring territories. 

4) It’s an open secret among the Iranian political establishment that the Israeli policy (pushed especially by the Israeli political class rather than its military) is to broaden the Gaza war to include Iran and foment a direct military confrontation between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic. This is what IR president Pezeshkian referred to as the “trap” during his UN visit this week.

5) Iranian foreign policy—in contradistinction to its more emotive and ideological domestic policy—is historically based on realism and a rational cost-benefit analysis. Iran believes that it can relatively easily match and eventually overcome Israel in a protracted military conflict, but it also knows that it can hardly withstand U.S. military power absent a total war and the sort of national mobilization that it can ill afford. 

6) With its hands full in Ukraine already and with more than 40000 troops spread thin across West Asia, the Biden administration cannot afford entanglement in yet another Middle Eastern war either (especially in an election year). So Washington and Tehran have seen a convergence of interests and repeatedly worked together to coordinate their mutual response in order to avoid a scenario of a U.S.-Iranian war. 

7) After the Haniyeh killing, Iran knew that it had to act to reestablish deterrence. Having had its sovereignty violated, Tehran also had the right international pretext for a direct large-scale assualt on Israel upping the ante from its unprecedented yet largely orchestrated April attacks. It could activate Hezbollah, its most important deterrent against Israel, or engage in coordinated targeted operations in tandem with the Hezbollah and its other proxies. 

8) Yet it held back after much backchanneling with the Biden administration, which convinced Tehran that the specter of Iranian escalation could be leveraged by the U.S. to push Netanyahu into a ceasefire deal in Gaza. This would’ve been interpreted as a symbolic victory for the Islamic Republic (and for the Biden diplomacy) since both sides had prioritized ceasefire as their key agenda item. So the Iranian leadership decided on restraint. 

9) Compounding this latest development is the long-standing belief among Iranian geopolitical analysts that as a securitized state, Israel is its own worst enemy. In taking the longer view and refusing a proper and proportionate response to Israeli provocations, Iran would simply give the Israelis a false sense of superiority handing them the rope with which to hang themselves, so this argument goes. Israel would continue to escalate and court endless military commitments — undermining its own position both regionally and internationally in the process.

10) But as weeks passed and no Gaza ceasefire materialized, it became clear that Iran had made the wrong bet by trusting the Biden administration. Iran is now paying the cost of its blind faith by being squeezed further by Israel.

11) Yet even as Israel engages in more open provocations — conducting the mass pager “terror” attack (to use former U.S. Defense Secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta’s characterization), launching a ‘preemptive’ aerial campaign against alleged Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon, and now threatening imminent ground offensive into Lebanon — Iran continues to exercise restraint and doesn’t seem to want a part of it.

12) Academically, this is where things get interesting: ostensibly, Iranian and Lebanese sources can claim that their own entrapment strategy of trying to goad Israel into a ground invasion of Lebanon to get it bogged down in an attritional war is bearing fruit. 

Just as Russia knew that it would eventually win a war of attrition against a US-backed Ukraine, so do the Resistence forces think that Israel will eventually falter in the course of a long war as its patron loses resolve and domestic support for such unconditional backing of Israel. Yet given that much of the Washington Blob is entirely beholden to Israel, effectively mortgaging American interests to satiate the incessant Israeli security dilemma, this belief seems especially misplaced.

13) In reality, the strange and uncharacteristically naive Iranian behavior is a textbook case of how domestic considerations can impact and distort foreign policy decision-making. Behind Iran’s dithering (and some would argue Israel’s escalations) lies the large shadow of the U.S. presidential elections.

14) Iran’s inaction is less motivated by its attempt to avoid a regional war with Israel (though that’s an added benefit) but by its fear about a second Trump administration and how an all-out war in the Middle East would practically guarantee that outcome. Israel’s ramped up attacks, meanwhile, are as much about creating a rallying effect for Netanyahu, boosting his public support in Israel, as they are about using the impotence of the current U.S. administration to achieve the longtime state objective of neutralizing adversaries in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon with minimal pushback.

15) From the Iranian perspective, the matter is further complicated by the internal political rifts within the Islamic Republic between a political establishment loyal to the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his Office and the younger hardliners coalescing around Saeed Jalili. The latter faction — fueled by Shia exceptionalist fervor — is incensed by Khamenei’s backing of moderate Pezashkian as president and what this signals about Iran’s more conciliatory grand strategy and the country’s general direction.

Despite Mossad’s prowess, the massive intelligence failure that resulted in the assassination of sunni Haniyeh would have required inside assistance, and the ultra-revolutionaries close to Jalili staff Iran’s security and intelligence agencies as mid-level bureacrats. After Israel, the Iranian hardliners had the most to gain from Haniyeh’s death on the eve of Pezeshkian’s inauguration: derailing the Gaza ceasefire talks, obstructing Iran’s reset with the West, and justifying Iranian intervention against Israel which put the country back on a collision course with both Israel and the West.

16) As such, Iran can argue that Its reluctance to join the fight is warranted not only because it denies its enemy, Israel, what it clearly wants, but also because it prevents the subversive hardliners from dictating their will and substituting their militant agenda as the state’s policy. 

17) On the Israeli side, ramping up its military aggression now and broadening the war onto Lebanon around the anniversary of October 7th not only is intended to signal resolve, but also has the added benefit of amounting to an October surprise impacting the U.S. election against the Democrats. 

18) Ultimately, decades of U.S. primacy and military interventionism in the Middle East has informed the current decision-making in Tehran and Jerusalem. Both Iran and Israel are linking the timing and intended effect of their operations to US domestic politics (and their preferred choice of candidate) rather than actual geopolitical imperatives. 

19) This is dangerous as Iran’s temporary suspension of realist principles, combined with the absence of U.S. leadership, has given Netanyahu the carte blanche to escalate as he sees fit. The lack of a proportional Iranian or Turkish response to Israeli provocations does not mean that tensions are not simmering under the surface. In fact, the very absence of effective deterrence and step-by-step balancing against Israel makes internecine regional war involving U.S. forces more likely. 

20) The Iranian policy of betting it all on a future Harris victory is also profoundly unwise. The ebb and flow of Iranian grand strategy should not depend on who the American people decide to put in the White House. Regardless of the fact that the Islamic Republic might actually have better chances of finding a grand bargain (if it so chooses) with a more transactional Donald Trump instead of the Democrats, Iranian strategy should always be derived from its concrete national interest.

For now, however, and possibly until November 6th, Iran will likely sit back and absorb the losses to its major ally and the blows to its reputation in the region. But this all means that it will have to respond even more aggressively once it decides that its timing matches the U.S. presidential calender. If an all-out war breaks out involving the United States, Tehran may live to rue its current idleness and miscalculation of allowing ancillary considerations to impair its judgment.