World is sweating on Iran’s response

As one senior US official noted Wednesday, the Israelis could have killed Haniyeh, one of the main interlocutors on a ceasefire and prisoner-exchange deal that appears imperilled again, anywhere in the Middle East.

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The official noted that the Israelis chose to do it in Iran during the inauguration. Foreign dignitaries from more than 80 nations were at the ceremony, where security was tight. The message was obvious. The assassins were not only retaliating against Hamas leaders for the October 7 terror attack in Israel that killed more than 1100 civilians, but were also reminding Iran’s new leaders that they, too, were within easy reach.

But as Pezeshkian is bound to discover as Iran considers its options, measuring the right response without tipping the country into a devastating war, is no easier for the new president than it was for the previous eight men who have held the office since the Iranian revolution.

“The attack injects a major crisis for Iran’s new president on his first day on the job,” Ali Vaez, head of the Iran project at the International Crisis Group, said on Wednesday. “Pezeshkian ran on a pledge to rebalance Iran’s foreign relations” and to relieve sanctions, a vow he made in his inauguration address to the country.

“A regional escalation against a key US ally will shut the already extremely narrow window there might have been for diplomatic engagement,” Vaez said.

In truth, that window was all but shut before the killing.

Iran was engaged in indirect negotiations with the Biden administration in 2021 and 2022, and at moments the two sides seemed close to reviving some version of the 2015 nuclear deal, which put sharp limits on Iran’s nuclear fuel production, in return for sanctions relief. As president, Donald Trump pulled the US out of the agreement in 2018.

But President Joe Biden’s effort to fashion a new accord collapsed in talks with the government of President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May. With the American presidential election so close – and the prospect of Trump’s return to office – the Iranians had little incentive to revive the conversation.

For Pezeshkian, the news that a key ally and a guest at his inauguration was killed was also a personal blow, according to two members of his advisory committee who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak on the record.

He emerged from an emergency meeting with Khamenei and members of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council to accuse Israel of staging the attacks. “We will make the occupying terrorist regime regret its action,” he said in a statement.

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But attending the meetings and influencing the decision-making on retaliation are different. It is unclear that a man who was elected to relieve social tension, touting a platform of liberalising social rules on wearing the hijab and use of the internet, will have influence over the Revolutionary Guard, which was particularly humiliated by the strike. Pezeshkian has said that he fully backs Iran’s state policy toward Israel and supports the militant groups in the region.

“My sense is Pezeshkian will not have an impact on the decision,” said Suzanne Maloney, vice president and director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and a long-time Iran expert. “He was never a part of the inner circle on security.”

Maloney said it was possible that the supreme leader, in ordering a direct retaliatory strike on Israel, meant a missile attack – similar to what it attempted April 13, its biggest and most overt attack on Israel since the 1979 Iranian revolution. It launched hundreds of missiles and drones in retaliation for an Israeli strike on its embassy compound in Damascus, Syria, which killed several Iranian military commanders.

But even that show of force was telegraphed well in advance. General Michael E Kurilla, who heads US Central Command, had time to organise a comprehensive missile defence that included US, Israeli and Jordanian forces, among other allies. Nearly all the weapons were shot down and little damage was done.

Now the United States is likely to try to assemble that coalition – which some US officials describe as a nascent NATO-like defensive alliance – to fend off another attack in days or weeks. They will urge the Israelis not to escalate when and if an attack comes, noting that in April, the fears of a regional war dissipated after Israel dropped a few weapons into Isfahan, Iran, while keeping them far from the nuclear sites surrounding that city.

Other forms of retaliation could also follow. While US officials believe that neither Israel nor Hezbollah wants a war on the territory of Lebanon, the possibilities for an accident or overreaction are ripe.

The riskiest move would be crossing the line from developing fuel for a nuclear weapon to developing the weapon itself. “Instead of being at least a year away from having breakout capacity to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon, they’re probably one or two weeks away from doing that,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on July 19 at the Aspen Security Forum. “Where we are now is not a good place.”

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Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, both said they had yet to see a political decision to move toward making a bomb. But they noted the increasing conversation among Iranian leaders about that possibility.

“I have not seen a decision by Iran to move” in a way that signals Iran was definitely developing a weapon, Sullivan said at the same event. “If they start moving down that road, they’ll find a real problem with the United States.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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