Trump Threatens a Showdown with Iran. But How?
Trump’s weekend Twitter attack on the Islamic Republic was part of a larger campaign that the Administration is carrying out against Iran.
Shortly before midnight on Sunday, President Trump went on an all-caps rampage against Iran on Twitter: “NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!” The tweet reflects an escalating U.S. campaign against the Islamic Republic that is playing out publicly in bellicose language by Trump Administration officials, and quietly in covert information campaigns to reach beyond the regime to the Iranian people.
Two hours earlier, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a speech, in California, on “supporting Iranian voices” that fell just shy of formally calling for the regime’s ouster. He compared Iran’s theocracy to the Mafia, labelled its clerics “hypocritical holy men,” and cited the corrupt wealth—in specific millions or billions of dollars—of top officials. As Iran approaches the fortieth anniversary of its revolution, next February, Pompeo said, “it’s America’s hope that the next forty years of Iran’s history will not be marked by repression and fear but with freedom and fulfillment—for the Iranian people.”
The President’s tweet was partly a response to the weekend address by the Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani, to his diplomatic corps that included overtures on both war and peace. “Iran’s power is deterrence. We have no fight or war with anybody,” he said. “But the enemies must understand well that war with Iran is the mother of all wars, and peace with Iran is the mother of all peace. We have never been intimidated—and will respond threat with threat.”
He pointedly addressed his American counterpart. “Mr. Trump! We are the people of dignity and guarantor of security of the waterway of the region throughout history,” Rouhani said. (The Strait of Hormuz is the narrow choke point for tankers carrying Gulf oil exports to the rest of the world.) “Don’t play with the lion’s tail; you will regret it.” He warned, “Know your words and their consequences.”
The mounting public pressure on Tehran follows Trump’s decision, in May, to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal—brokered between Iran and the world’s six major powers—and re-impose economic sanctions. Rouhani had staked his run for the Presidency, in 2013, on doing a nuclear deal with the United States, getting sanctions lifted, and ending Tehran’s pariah status. The other five countries that negotiated the nuclear accord—Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia—have vowed to stick to the agreement.
The Trump Administration, meanwhile, is intensifying economic pressure on Iran. U.S. sanctions are due to go back into effect in two rounds, in August and November. Iran is not the only place that will feel the pinch. Any foreign company—anywhere—that continues to do business with Iran also faces U.S. sanctions. Many big businesses—France’s Total, Germany’s Siemens, and Italy’s Danieli—have said that they will stop doing business in Iran as a result.
The Administration’s strategy now is to squeeze Tehran—and, effectively, allies that are still party to the deal. But its goal appears to extend well beyond simply renegotiating terms of Iran’s nuclear program. It also wants Iran to end its support of extremist movements, stop meddling in the region, end human-rights abuses, release political prisoners, and stop testing missiles.
Rouhani dismissed the American demands in his weekend speech. “Today, speaking with U.S. has no meaning except surrender,” he told Iranian diplomats.
On Monday, Trump vowed not to back down. During a tour of the “Made in America” exhibition on the White House lawn, Trump was asked—in a question shouted by a pool reporter—whether he had any concern about provoking Iran’s ayatollahs with his tweet. “None at all,” Trump replied.
The President believes tough rhetoric will deter more aggressive behavior by Iran, Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a conservative think tank, told me. “Since he escalated the rhetoric in February 2017, we have seen a sharp drop in Iranian missile tests and harassment of the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf compared to the period after the J.C.P.O.A.,” Dubowitz said. “This is not a coincidence, as the regime historically backs down in the face of displays of American steel and pushes forward when it perceives American mush.”
Meanwhile, Pompeo’s speech “was designed to intensify the existing split between the Iranian state and Iranian society,” he added. “His focus on regime corruption—naming names and providing financial details—is a central pillar of a financial and diplomatic pressure strategy to highlight the regime’s criminality.” Pompeo’s remarks—to Iranian-Americans assembled at the Ronald Reagan Library, in California, follow strikes last December and January in nearly all of Iran’s thirty-one provinces over unemployment and economic hardships.
The Trump tweet was reminiscent of similar language that the President used in a warning to North Korea, in August, 2017. “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” he told reporters. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Ten months later, Trump became the first U.S. President to hold a summit with his North Korean counterpart—after which the President called Kim “smart,” “funny,” a “good negotiator,” and a leader who “loves his people.”
“Trump used a similar public battering technique against North Korea,” Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told me. “But the President has started fights and trumpeted summits to date that haven’t resulted in significant gains.”
The Administration’s hostile rhetoric rings hollow, especially if Iran does not go back to the negotiating table. Then what does Washington do? “What is the Iranian regime we envision replacing the current Rouhani regime? The U.S. failed to adequately work this out before invading Iraq and paid with a decade-long quagmire,” Watts said. Mobilizing the means to do it is even more problematic, with the U.S. military “overstretched in two campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, where regime change has never truly taken hold,” he added. “We shouldn’t be travelling the earth picking fights.”
Even if the United States succeeded in orchestrating regime change—as it did in 1953 against a democratically elected government in Tehran—there is no guarantee that the next Iranian government would be any more amenable to Washington, Watts added. “We’ve seen in Afghanistan and Iraq that the devil we don’t know is just as bad or worse than the devil we had before regime change,” he said.
The momentum toward some kind of bigger showdown, though, is building. In a tweet on Monday, Mohsen Rezaei, a former commander of the Revolutionary Guard and a former Presidential candidate, noted that fifty thousand American troops today are in range of Iran’s weaponry. U.S. troops are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, which border Iran, as well as in Syria, where Americans and Iranians are deployed to help rival sides of the conflict. The Iranian Defense Minister, Amir Hatami, issued his own warning during the announcement of a new production line to make Iran’s own air-to-air missiles. Americans, he said, “don’t understand any other language than force.”
For now, the escalating tensions are rhetorical. The danger is that they generate a reality that neither side really wants.
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