The US uses two key strategies to prevent Iran from escalating attacks on Israel

Since the Iranian terrorist organization Hamas launched several coordinated attacks on Israel on October 7 last year, the main fear of further escalation in the region has focused on how Iran might escalate the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. On April 13, Iran directly attacked Israel from its own territory for the first time in a series of missile and drone launches following the Israeli bombing of the Iranian embassy in Syria. Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system destroyed 99% of the weapons. However, no further major direct attacks by Iran against Israeli territory followed, after subsequent – ​​and arguably much more serious – Israeli operations on Iran. A rocket strike on a playground in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on July 27 killed 12 children and young adults, but it came from the Iranian-backed Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah. It was Hezbollah again – not Iran directly – that fired more than 320 rockets into Israel on August 25, following Israeli operations against Hamas and Hezbollah on July 30 and July 31. And yet another Hezbollah launched rocket and missile attacks on Israel over the weekend. So why has Iran so far refrained from further major direct attacks of the same scale against Israel?

One of the two main reasons for this – the “stick” in this carrot-and-stick approach by the US, Israel and Western allies – is, of course, the threat of overwhelming military action against Iran. The U.S. has made it very clear to Tehran that any major attack on Israel directly by Iran could lead to massive retaliation with conventional weapons against key military targets across the country, followed by an expansion of the target profile if deemed appropriate at the time respectively. This is exactly the same warning given to Russia in its actions in Ukraine by the US, which also proved equally effective in preventing Moscow’s originally considered use of tactical (“battlefield”) nuclear weapons in Ukraine where local battles in certain areas had reached a stalemate. As former CIA Director and retired four-star Army General David Petraeus said: “We would respond by leading a NATO effort – a collective – that would eliminate every Russian conventional force that we can see and identify on the battlefield in Ukraine and also in the Crimea and every ship in the Black Sea”. The scale of retaliation against Iran would start at a much lower level than this, given that it would not involve detonating a nuclear device against an ally, a senior figure in the European Union (EU) security complex has exclusively said. OilPrice.com last week. “However, the capability is there and the determination to use it if necessary, and Iran knows it,” he added.

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The other main reason for Iran’s avoidance so far of any major direct attack on Israel is the “carrot” of a new iteration of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, or colloquially the “nuclear deal”). “Iran has a growing budget deficit, skyrocketing inflation and a depreciating currency, and it is only thanks to its oil and gas exports that it has continued to function economically, and therefore politically, at all,” the EU source said last week. However, with oil prices still looking weak, even this economic package looks increasingly damaged, which poses particular difficulties for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), he added. “As the economy continues to shrink, the IRGC’s funding is decreasing, and that means a reduction in its ability to perform all the tasks it needs to do,” he said. “One of these is to spread Iran’s vision of Islam across the globe, which it does partly through proxies, whom it has to pay, and the other is to undermine Iran’s enemies, which it does through other proxies, which, by also they have to pay and they only take (US) dollars and gold,” he told OilPrice.com.

A signal that Iran is ready to discuss a new version of the JCPOA came with the July 5 election of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian following the death in a helicopter crash of his predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, on May 19. He is widely seen in the West as a “moderate”, in the same vein as former President Hassan Rouhani, under whose leadership the JCPOA was forged and then implemented before the US unilaterally withdrew from it in May 2018. that said, Rouhani was not a moderate in the true sense of the word, as detailed in my latest book on the new global oil market order. Certainly, he was keen to re-engage with the West, but this was based on economic and financial considerations for Iran and not on a deeper ideological basis that might have included embracing something other than the notion of Iran as a true Islamic state . In this sense, there was no difference between Rouhani and his group of supporters versus the more overtly Islamic elements in Iran’s political and religious architecture, including the IRGC, who are commonly referred to as “hardliners”. All of these groups – political, religious and military – are firmly rooted in and support the Islamic and revolutionary ideals that were the cornerstone for the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979. The only difference between them was the nature of their commitment. with the West, which itself depends on how willing these groups are to “play the game” with the US and its core allies.

However, true moderate or not, the new Iranian president may be given indications that his team is open to a way to design a new version of the JCPOA for Iran with the West, according to the EU source. “Keeping this as a possibility for Iran has been done before at key moments in politics or in the energy markets when Tehran’s compliance was needed on a certain matter, only for it to go against the same,” he said , “and that’s FATF.” The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has 40 criteria and active mechanisms to prevent money laundering — a vital activity for the IRGC’s activities around the world, as also analyzed in my latest book on the new global oil market order. The FATF also has nine criteria and mechanisms to do the same for the financing of terrorism and related activities – again, a core of the IRGC’s role in promoting Iran’s brand of Islam around the globe. The FATF also has variable powers to exercise against individuals, companies or countries that violate any of its standards, and is extremely aggressive in using them gradually, depending on whether the sanctioned entity is on its “grey” or “black” list. black”. In conclusion, depending on whether the US wants Iranian compliance on one issue or another, it will either give up the centrality of Iran complying with key parts of the FATF, or it will rigorously insist that all of them be fully complied with. As seen in Rouhani’s presidency, the FATF is a no-loss tool from the US perspective: either progress was made by Rouhani’s government in moving towards eventual membership of the FATF (which were aimed at gradually chipping away at the wider power of the IRGC) , or the sanctions relief elements of the JCPOA would be frozen and perhaps reversed (which were aimed at the gradual destruction of Iran’s economy).

The U.S. balancing act has become more delicate in recent weeks, with strong suspicions that Iran has received extensive assistance in its ongoing nuclear weapons development program from Russia in exchange for Tehran’s missiles and drones to use to Moscow in the Ukraine War. The UK, France and Germany jointly warned two weeks ago that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium had grown significantly to the point where it had accumulated enough to produce four nuclear devices. During an even more recent visit to London, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said US intelligence had concluded that Iran’s first batch of high-speed Fath-360 ballistic missiles – with a range of up to 75 miles – have now been delivered. to Russia.

By Simon Watkins for Oilprice.com

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