Iran and a few unnamed U.S. officials have said that Israel is responsible for last week’s ambush assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, and sources confirm the United States was not involved. That’s good news — a second U.S. assassination of a prominent Iranian figure in 2020 might make war unavoidable.
Even so, it is still vital that Washington treads lightly now. That goes for both the outgoing Trump administration and the incoming Biden administration. Layering additional U.S. antagonism on top of the failed “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign of the past few years is a dangerous game.
The next two months will be a difficult and delicate moment in U.S.-Iran relations, not only because of considerable extant tensions but because of the well-known differences between the incumbent president and the newly elected president on Iran policy.
Joe Biden plans to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal, from which President Trump withdrew the U.S. in 2018. The Trump team is openly attempting to forestall Biden’s plan by “slap[ping] as many sanctions as possible on Iran” before Inauguration Day. If the relationship can be sufficiently embittered and the legal context sufficiently complicated, perhaps Biden will be unable to move forward with his agenda.
But there is one major point on which Biden and Trump agree (at least, sometimes, and against the input of some of his key advisers): It would not serve U.S. interests to go to war with Iran. As Trump said in his January speech backing away from further immediate military engagement with Iran, de-escalation is “a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world.”
Indeed, war with Iran would be bloody, costly, and, if recent U.S. interventions in neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq are any indication, would become a multidecade debacle of failed regime change and nation-building rife with unintended consequences. The risk is not that the U.S. would be conquered but that it would yet again be drawn into a long, slow loss of its own making.
Iran could not invade America or pose an existential threat (the whole Iranian GDP is about $460 billion as of 2019, smaller than the Pentagon’s annual budget). But Tehran, the seat of a larger, wealthier, and better-defended country than either Afghanistan or Iraq at the time of U.S. invasion, is certainly capable of stalemating the U.S. in miserable perpetuity. We need to keep the peace.
So what does treading lightly look like now, particularly in the transition between presidents with such disparate Iran policies, despite this one point of occasional agreement? For the departing Trump administration, it means, at minimum, refraining from needless inflammatory language that will undermine comparative centrists in Iranian politics and empower anti-American hardliners.
Ideally, the Trump team would also abandon its scheme to “flood” Iran with new sanctions, a move that seems motivated at least as much by partisan spite as genuine differences of opinion about national security. Sanctions relief is especially needed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, as exceptions permitting imports of medicine and other necessities are often rendered functionally void by strictures on financial institutions. Lifting sanctions instead of adding more would be an important gesture of goodwill that could help ensure stability during the transition period.
Even if the Trump administration continues to add sanctions, however, the Biden team can still plan its pivot to de-escalation as soon as Biden takes office. Fortunately, Tehran’s response to the Fakhrizadeh assassination has been pointedly temperate where the U.S. is concerned, with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Saturday treating the strike as an attempt to make trouble while the American presidency changes hands. The maximum “pressure era is coming to an end, and the global conditions are changing,” Rouhani said. His implication: Iran will continue its recent policy of laying low as it now waits out Trump and prepares to deal with Biden instead.
That’s welcome news and a sign that neither this assassination nor the Trump administration’s final swipes at Iran have succeeded in precluding new diplomatic progress between Washington and Tehran next year. Biden should forge ahead with returning to the Iran deal and recentering U.S. foreign policy on realistic diplomacy instead of war and sanctions — and he must select national security staff who will help him do it.
Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities, contributing editor at the Week, and columnist at Christianity Today. Her writing has also appeared at CNN, NBC, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and Defense One, among other outlets.
