Tehran has set out a protracted negotiating timetable designed to keep Donald Trump embroiled in the Iran conflict until the midterm elections, in the hope of inflicting the same ruinous blow on his presidency as Jimmy Carter suffered over the ۱۹۷۹-۸۱ US embassy hostage crisis.
For many inside Iran, inflicting meaningful revenge on Trump is a legitimate and self-standing war aim, reflected in the mood of those attending the funeral of the late supreme leader Ali Khamenei where demands for retribution were ubiquitous.
While Iranian officials since the ۱۹۷۹ Islamic revolution have never trusted the US, that animus is now also directed personally towards Trump. He not only tore up the painfully negotiated nuclear deal in ۲۰۱۸, but he also sanctioned the assassination of the military leader Qassem Suleimani and twice involved Iran in negotiations on its nuclear programme only to launch wars against it. He shows no remorse for the killing of the country’s supreme leader, or for the attempt on the life of Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian.
As the countdown to November’s midterm US elections begins, what could be the political demise of Trump has become a subject of obsessive speculation in Tehran. Iranian media track Trump’s waning ratings, attributing the decline to the war’s unpopularity and high oil prices. The changing politics of the Democrats is minutely examined.
But the focus on the midterms became more obvious this week when the deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, told the official IRNA news agency that after agreeing a route for commercial shipping through the strait of Hormuz, it would take two to four months to reach the second phase of negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme. The original plan – to commence the nuclear phase of the talks within ۳۰ days of signing June’s memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the US – had been jettisoned by the Trump administration, Gharibabadi said.
To get to that second stage, he laid out an obstacle course including the lifting of sanctions, the end of the US blockade of Iranian ports, the unfreezing of Iranian assets and new commitments on non-belligerence in a process that could last well beyond the midterms.
If Tehran gets its way on this timetable, Trump will be going to the polls with no Iranian commitment on nuclear weapons, only a hefty economic bill for a failed war. “This raises the very likely scenario of continued cycles of conflict between the US and Tehran over the strait,” said Jason Brodsky from United against a Nuclear Iran, an advocate of the war. “There won’t be any true quiet before the midterm elections – Tehran has no interest in giving this to the Trump administration […] It will continue to play games.”
Mehr News, an agency close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, published a piece saying Iran had given Trump a major dilemma. “Continuing the war could increase political and economic pressure on the government and exacerbate the decline in his popularity. On the other hand, backing down, or moving towards reducing tensions, could also be interpreted by some of Trump’s supporters as a retreat from his campaign slogans,” it said.
From this perspective, the outcome of this war will not be played out on the battlefield, but at the ballot box. The agency suggested the outcome could affect the course of American domestic and foreign policy for years to come.
Few in Iran take Trump’s statements at face value. But his denials that the midterms affect his Iran strategy are treated with special scepticism. Iranian media point to comments from Marc Zell, chair of Republicans Overseas Israel, who has said: “It’s all about the midterms […] the American public simply is tired of war and the administration is navigating the pre-election waters adroitly in order to avoid a Democratic takeover of Congress.”
Such remarks fuel the debate inside Iran about how much the midterms should be part of Iran’s calculus. Some believe the loss of Congress will inhibit him or lead to his impeachment, at the very least, it might mark the end of the war’s funding. Mostafa Zahrani, a former Iranian diplomat, argued electoral defeat “will make it inevitable that Trump will not be able to go back to war and will take the negotiations seriously”.
Others such as Nasser Hadian, a professor of international relations at Tehran University, disagree. An advocate of cashing in on Iran’s victories now rather than waiting for Trump to become weaker. “If he loses, he’ll have less incentive to reach an agreement with Iran, because in that case he’ll be weakened, and Israel and others will find it much easier to attack him – something they don’t dare do now,” he said. “Those who say we should wait for the midterm elections have no understanding of politics in America”.
The pleasure for Iran in seeing Trump defeated would indeed be reduced if feeling he has nothing left to lose, but its diplomats overall believe Trump’s freedom to act will indeed be constrained by the unpopularity of more conflict and by Republican presidential candidates anxious to wrap this up. Trump would also be at risk of seeing his whole second term consumed by a disastrous war.
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The bigger question is what Iran itself wants to achieve. Agreeing to keep the dispute simmering until November is not an answer to that question – one that Iranians are better at debating than resolving.
Pezeshkian, working in alliance with Mohammad Ghalibaf, the chief negotiator, repeatedly says he does not want endless war, and insists that the vast majority of the supreme national security council concur. He still has faith in the MoU, saying it should be the cornerstone of Iran’s foreign policy.
But conservative newspaper Kayhan describes the memorandum as worthless since the US always breaks its commitments. “Accordingly, officials should know that the strait of Hormuz is not a bargaining chip and should not be
opened as a passage for America,” it said.
Both hardliners and moderates envision the war leading to a new regional security architecture. But the hardliners put the emphasis on America’s expulsion and see this as something less to be negotiated and more to be enforced using control of the strait of Hormuz’s entry points as a lever to close US bases.
Pezeshkian says he sees a place for legitimate US investment in Iran while the former foreign minister Javad Zarif, in an essay this week, argued Iran in “a post-polar era would benefit from not depending solely on Russia and China in future”.
If Iran developed “a balanced and multifaceted foreign policy”, Tehran would not be forced into relationships based on necessity, he wrote. “Continuing uncontrolled tensions with the United States not only imposes direct costs on Iran, but also makes it more difficult for other countries, even close partners such as China and Russia, to cooperate with Iran”.
Just as Trump cannot resolve from one sentence to the next what he thinks of Iran, nor can Iran agree what it thinks it can get from America.
