As the political track to roll back Iranian influence fails to produce desired results, Washington and its regional allies are debating whether to mirror what the Iranians did: build up proxies capable of challenging them militarily. This, however, is a daunting task. Organizations like Hezbollah, for example, are not just military groups acting on Iran’s behalf. It is a genuine Lebanese grassroots organization. Armed struggle is only one dimension of its activities. The rest is focused on social and political work, all of which integrates the holistic concept of “resistance”. By contrast, as the Syrian war has shown, the most militarily capable Sunni militant groups are in the orbit of al-Qaeda, pursuing a global jihad through means of nihilistic terrorism. And those Sunni militants that are outside this orbit, like Hamas, are in many ways allies of Iran and Hezbollah.
So, the notion of openly supporting al-Qaeda/Islamic State-type proxies against Iran/Hezbollah would be politically costly for the US and its allies and inevitably backfire, like it did on September 11. Kurds are not considered plausible proxies, given their own dynamic and complex relationships with Iran. There is, of course, an option of hiring an army of mercenaries paid by mainly Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. But in the long term, mercenaries are always at disadvantage when confronted with highly motivated and capable local foes.
Taken together, these aggressive efforts to counter Iranian influence would only stiffen the resolve of Tehran and its allies/proxies to protect their positions and contribute to the destabilization of countries like Lebanon and Iraq. In such a climate, any talk of Hezbollah giving up its arms and becoming a “normal” social and political Lebanese actor would be an obvious no-go. In Iraq, consensus-minded politicians like Abadi would find it difficult to retain power, while figures like Hadi al-Amiri would be on the ascendant. Any prospect of security sector reform, involving the demobilization of the Hashd Shabi militias or their integration into the official security forces of the state, would be rendered impossible. To the contrary, there will be ample incentive for Iran and its allies in Iraq to transform Hashd into an Iraqi version of Hezbollah.
Thus, Trump administration’s anti-Iranian offensive is likely to make the Middle East even more violent and unstable than it already is. There was no need for that. The JCPOA opened the way for engaging Iran, also on regional issues. None other than Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei recognized as much when he said that the JCPOA was a test that, if successful, could lead to opening up conversation between the US and Iran on other issues. That could have provided an opportunity to address and perhaps even remove the more objectionable Iranian policies in the region. The utterly unnecessary crisis manufactured by Trump precludes that possibility. The result is likely to be not so much Iranian rollback as more chaos and destabilization in the Middle East.There appears be two options to the neocon U.S. pullout of the JCPOA, one oriented primarily around recreating the pre-JCPOA status quo -- economic strangulation through extensive sanctions and periodic terror attacks on critical infrastructure and personnel -- and the other an outright military strike a la Libya.
The first can't succeed because China, Russia and most likely Europe -- we'll have to wait and see what effect Italy's new government has on the neoliberal corporate hive mind in Brussels -- are absolutely not going back to the pre-JCPOA status quo.
The days when China and Russia go along with U.S. global leadership are long gone. Was it Obama's "pivot to Asia"? Was it the Umbrella Revolution? We know for Russia it was definitely Kiev February 2014.
So sanctions aren't going to work over the long haul. China and Russia will continue to trade with Iran, if not Germany and Italy. That leaves option #2, the Gaddafi option. But Iran is not Libya. Persia has been around for a long time, longer than Europe. It is going to take more than F-16s and Tomahawks to bring Iran down. That was the whole point of the JCPOA. There were enough people within the U.S. national security state who understood that the Gaddafi option wouldn't work for Iran. To think otherwise is insanity.
By now we should know that this is Trump's game. He bluffs, runs right up against the insane and the absurd, and then he sashays backwards, rubbing out his tracks as he retreats. But before we can cry foul, he's on to the next absurdity, cartwheeling and tweeting.
Trump has made himself vulnerable to China though. If he accepts China's reported offer of $200 billion in additional imports from the U.S., he'll have to capitulate on his demands that China end "Made in China 2025"; he'll have to give in on national security restrictions to Chinese purchases of U.S. tech.
Without China there is no peace deal on the Korean Peninsula. Trump badly wants a peace deal between North and South Korea. He's hungry for it because he believes it will guarantee him a second term and it will put him in the history books as one of the greatest statesmen of all time.
But Trump's foreign policy team, minus Mattis, is composed of full-spectrum dominance neocons, which is why he'll try to keep everyone on board by promising a Gaddafi option on Iran.
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