Dear Joe, It’s Not About Iran’s Nukes Anymore
Biden
wants to reinstate the nuclear deal, but first he must confront the new Middle
East.
Opinion
Columnist
- Nov. 29, 2020, 5:14 p.m. ET
With the assassination by Israel of
Iran’s top nuclear warhead designer, the Middle East is promising to complicate
Joe Biden’s job from day one. President-elect Biden knows the region well, but
if I had one piece of advice for him, it would be this: This is not the Middle
East you left four years ago.
The best way for Biden to appreciate
the new Middle East is to study what happened in the early hours of Sept. 14,
2019 — when the Iranian Air Force launched 20 drones and precision-guided
cruise missiles at Abqaiq, one of Saudi Arabia’s most important oil fields and
processing centers, causing huge damage. It was a seminal event.
The Iranian drones and cruise missiles
flew so low and with such stealth that neither their takeoff nor their
impending attack was detected in time by Saudi or U.S. radar. Israeli military
analysts, who were stunned by the capabilities the Iranians displayed, argued
that this surprise attack was the Middle East’s “Pearl Harbor.”
They were right. The
Middle East was reshaped by this Iranian precision missile strike, by President
Trump’s response and by the response of Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United
Arab Emirates to Trump’s response.
A lot of people missed it, so let’s go
to the videotape.
First, how did President Trump react?
He did nothing. He did not launch a retaliatory strike on behalf of Saudi
Arabia — even though Iran, unprovoked, had attacked the heart of Saudi Arabia’s
oil infrastructure.
A few weeks later Trump did send 3,000
U.S. troops and some antimissile batteries to Saudi Arabia to bolster its
defense — but with this message on
Oct. 11, 2019: “We are sending troops and other things to the Middle East to
help Saudi Arabia. But — are you ready? Saudi Arabia, at my request, has agreed
to pay us for everything we’re doing. That’s a first.”
It sure was a first. I’m not here to
criticize Trump, though. He was reflecting a deep change in the American
public. His message: Dear Saudis, America is now the world’s biggest oil
producer; we’re getting out of the Middle East; happy to sell you as many
weapons as you can pay cash for, but don’t count on us to fight your battles.
You want U.S. troops? Show me the money.
That clear shift in American posture
gave birth to the first new element that Biden will confront in this new Middle
East — the peace agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and
between Israel and Bahrain — and a whole new level of secret security
cooperation between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which will likely flower into more
formal relations soon. (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel reportedly
visited Saudi Arabia last week.)
In effect, Trump
forced Israel and the key Sunni Arab states to become less reliant on the
United States and to think about how they must cooperate among themselves over
new threats — like Iran — rather than fighting over old causes — like
Palestine. This may enable America to secure its interests in the region with
much less blood and treasure of its own. It could be Trump’s most significant
foreign policy achievement.
But a key result is that as Biden
considers reopening negotiations to revive the Iran nuclear deal — which Trump
abandoned in 2018 — he can expect to find Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the
United Arab Emirates operating as a loose anti-Iran coalition. This will almost
certainly complicate things for Biden, owing to the second huge fallout from
the Iranian attack on Abqaiq: The impact it had on Israel.
After Trump scrapped the nuclear deal,
Iran abandoned its commitments to restrict its enrichment of uranium that could
be used for a nuclear bomb. But since Biden’s election, Iran has said it would
“automatically” return to its nuclear commitments if Biden lifts the crippling
sanctions imposed by Trump. Only after those sanctions are lifted, said Tehran,
might it discuss regional issues, like curbs on Iran’s precision missile exports
and capabilities.
This is where the problems will start
for Biden. Yes, Israel and the Sunni Arab states want to make sure that Iran
can never develop a nuclear weapon. But some Israeli military experts will tell
you today that the prospect of Iran having a nuke is not what keeps them up at
night — because they don’t see Tehran using it. That would be suicide and
Iran’s clerical leaders are not suicidal.
They are, though, homicidal.
And Iran’s new preferred weapons for
homicide are the precision-guided missiles, that it used on Saudi Arabia and
that it keeps trying to export to its proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and
Iraq, which pose an immediate homicidal threat to Israel, Saudi Arabia, United
Arab Emirates, Iraq and U.S. forces in the region. (Iran has a network of
factories manufacturing its own precision-guided missiles.)
If Biden tries to just resume the Iran
nuclear deal as it was — and gives up the leverage of extreme economic
sanctions on Iran, before reaching some understanding on its export of
precision-guided missiles — I suspect that he’ll meet a lot of
resistance from Israel, the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia.
Why? It’s all in the word “precision.”
In the 2006 war in Lebanon, Iran’s proxy militia, Hezbollah, had to fire some
20 dumb, unguided, surface-to-surface rockets of limited range in the hope of
damaging a single Israeli target. With precision-guided missiles
manufactured in Iran, Hezbollah — in theory — just needs to
fire one rocket each at 20 different targets in Israel with a high probability
of damaging each one. We’re talking about Israel’s nuclear plant, airport,
ports, power plants, high-tech factories and military bases.
That is why Israel
has been fighting a shadow war with Iran for the past five years to prevent
Tehran from reaching its goal of virtually encircling Israel with proxies in
Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Gaza, all armed with precision-guided missiles. The
Saudis have been trying to do the same versus Iran’s proxies in Yemen, who have fired on its airports. These missiles are
so much more lethal.
“Think of the difference in versatility
between dumb phones and smartphones,’’ observed Karim Sadjadpour, a senior
fellow at the Carnegie Endowment. “For the past two decades we have been
consumed by preventing Iran’s big weapon, but it is the thousands of small
smart weapons Iran has been proliferating that have become the real and
immediate threat to its neighbors.’’
That is why Israel and its Gulf Arab
allies are not going to want to see the United States give up its leverage on
Iran to curb its nuclear program before it also uses that leverage — all those
oil sanctions — to secure some commitment to end Iran’s export of these
missiles.
And that is going to be very, very
difficult to negotiate.
So, if you were planning a party to
celebrate the restoration of the Iran-U. S. nuclear deal soon after Biden’s
inauguration, keep the champagne in the fridge. It’s complicated.
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs
Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981, and has won three Pulitzer
Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,”
which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
