Joe Biden must bring a pragmatic balance of power back to the Middle East
The killing of the leading Iranian nuclear scientist Moshen Fakhrizadeh on Friday was as much a warning message for the incoming Biden administration in Washington as a hit against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Coincidence or not, the attack came just a few days between the most public of clandestine meetings between Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the outgoing US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. The prince had invited the Israeli leader and Pompeo to Neom on the Red Sea.
The faux secrecy of Netanyahu’s mission – the first of an Israeli leader to Saudi Arabia, was almost comical. The Israeli military censor was told it was a priority security matter – but that he shouldn’t attempt to counter reports if they leaked out on social media. Netanyahu wanted it to be known that the tough line on Iran, agreed with Trump and the Saudi regime would continue.
The message to Biden was blunt: you may say that you want to engage with the word, and revive the 2015 JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) nuclear deal with Iran – but that will not be our modus operandi.
The Iranian regime has been subtle in response – playing hard cop, soft cop. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei has warned of Iran retaliating for such an egregious attack on one of its most senior scientists – far from the first of such targeted assassinations. President Hassan Rouhani has been the cool head – condemning the attack, but waiting for the Biden White House to make the next move.
Over weekend, the commentariat has been full of wordy reflections about this being the last push of the Trump team to confront Iran, as they did at the beginning of the year with the Predator drone strike that killed the Iranian Quds Force commander, Major General Qasem Soleimani, at Baghdad airport in January.
The attack in Tehran that killed Fakhrizadeh was of a different kind, however. A hit squad of 12 men took part, using roadside bombs and remotely controlled heavy calibre machine guns, according to some reports, has been ascribed to Israel’s Mossad secret service.
No one has owned up to the killing so far, although Israel and its agents have been active inside Iran for an number of years. Over the past decade, four senior scientists allegedly involved in Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons programme have been killed. In June and July, three explosions described as “mysterious” caused damage at nuclear and military facilities near Parchin, the nuclear centre at Natanz, and a power station in Isfahan.
Earlier this month, it was reported that in the late summer the operations chief of Al Qaeda, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, nom de guerre Abu Muhammadal-Masri, had been killed in Iran by a hit squad. He had been sheltered as guest of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Abdullah was believed to have mounted the bombing attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in the summer of 1998, killing 224, including 12 Americans, and wounding 4,000. He was expected to succeed the ailing, and possibly dead, Aymen al-Zawahiri to head the organisation, and his daughter Miriam was the widow of Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza. She died in the attack on her father on or around 7 August. The Al-Qaeda leader was tracked by Israel’s elite Military Intelligence Unit 8200 – on which Boris Johnson hoped to model, in part, the UK’s new Cyber Force.
Yet if this series of attacks on Iranian soil, culminating with the assassination of Moshen Fakhrizadeh, was intended to thwart any chance of the US getting back into the nuclear negotiations round the 2015 JCPOA, then success is far from certain. Instead, the meeting between Pompeo, Netanyahu and MBS, the Saudi heir, seems to have been an almost desperate last throw of the dice. Mohammed bin Salman faces a new president who is distinctly unhappy with human rights abuses across the region – which puts his regime and that of his ally President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt under the spotlight.
Netanyahu’s gesture has not won him plaudits at home. He was aiming to establish normal relations with Saudi Arabia, on the lines of the recent agreements with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, but the Saudi prince refused to offer this. With the arrival of the experienced diplomatic, intelligence and security team already announced by Joe Biden, Netanyahu faces a reality check for some of the more extravagant policies he pushed with team Trump. It will mean a slowdown or stop to the creeping annexation of large chunks of the occupied West Bank. The Trump administration’s peace plan, spearheaded by Jared Kushner, to offer the Palestinians half a statelet on the basis that it was better than none, now gets its death certificate.
It doesn’t mean the end of Netanyahu and his schemes, bunkered and beleaguered though he is at home in Israel. Covid is still troubling, and he is being blamed. His corruption trial continues with embarrassing details of his domestic habits and views – but it is now paused. Typically, the Israeli Prime Minister has come up with his favourite tactic to get out of a jam with political friends and foes – by calling for yet another general election. It would be the fourth general election in under two years, which many Israelis will find hard to stomach – particularly as Covid-19 persists.
It is ironic that Trump frequently presents his Middle East policy as a great success of his administration. Under his auspices, America First has meant America last, as the US’s wider geopolitical position has become more erratic and uncertain. American troop levels are to be cut to 2,500 each in Afghanistan and Iraq, just at a point when pro-Western leaders in both countries are threatened by renewed violence. The American half-shuffle from Iraq and Syria is both incoherent policy and disastrous strategy according to critics – a group which includes most America’s serious military.
To combat this sense of retreat, Joe Biden has said that he will re-enter the diplomatic talks that brought he JCPOA, as a part of a general “engagement” strategy. Yet the Biden promise of engagement cannot mean just picking up where the Obama administration left off, however. The world and its challenges have gone through big changes since 2016, some subtle and some starkly brutal.
The task engaging with international groups and alliances that Trump shunned will be laborious and will require detailed diplomatic craftwork. It will mean connecting again not only with the Iran nuclear treaty process of the JCPOA and new START, but Nato, the UN and OSCE as a whole. Specific agencies, WHO and UNRWA which supports for the Palestinian territories, are back on the list.
It will have to be a change agenda because global circumstances have altered in so many aspects of the big items closing in from the horizon, of demography, climate and environmental change. And not least is the effect of Covid.
This means new forms of isolation, exclusion, confrontation and encirclement. Encirclement, an old-fashioned term common to nineteenth-century balance of power theories and politics, has been undergoing a dramatic revival lately. Encirclement is now apparent in the foreign policy and security stratagems of China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey, Nagorno-Karabakh, North and South Ossetia – to name only the most obvious examples – is a state of mind as much as a matter of lines on the geopolitical map.
So much of Iran’s posture is based on a historic sense of encirclement – stretching back to the Persian Empire. Punishing the Tehran regime by confrontation, sanctions and asymmetric attack from assassination to cyber campaigns has not succeeded. The failure of the tactics of Netanyahu’s Israel and his international backers is that it has been too tactical in focus, and lacking in strategic goals and perspectives. It has also left a backdoor open wide to China, a state that is willing to step into the void. The Chinese will buy Iran’s oil, and beef up its cyber and communications infrastructure, and upgrade defences, which will very likely include nuclear capability.
Encirclement paranoia is a new item for the international engagement plans of the Biden team. Clocks don’t go backwards – as much as they tried to make them do so in Trumpland. Biden’s new strategy of engagement means new geopolitical terms of reference and not just for just powers and nations and their sense of thwarted destiny. It will also herald diplomatic endeavours to shape factors such as the environment and climate, and their impact on human populations. Once seen as huge change factors on a comfortably distant horizon of the future, these are now centre stage in our present – and nowhere more so than in the troubled contemporary Middle East.
As President, Joe Biden will have his work cut out for him – but his inauguration represents a chance to usher in a new approach to the challenges posed by the Middle East. It could be one that connects a pragmatic handling of the region’s sharp diplomatic rifts with a more strategically astute vision of how the region also fits into a rapidly changing geopolitical chess board. Finding a new solution to the long-standing Iranian Question could be a could place to start.