Iranian President-elect Masoud Pezeshkian has signaled an openness to resuming dialogue with Washington on nuclear matters, and senior figures in his administration have indicated their readiness to even negotiate with a future president Donald Trump—the man directly responsible for triggering the unraveling of the 2015 nuclear deal.
With elections looming in November, the Biden administration cannot offer Iran comprehensive assurances on outstanding issues, such as the nuclear deal, that extend beyond its term, especially as the specter of a second Trump presidency casts a dark pall of uncertainty over the deal’s future.
That means that the appetite for nuclear diplomacy will be limited for the next three and a half months, but Pezeshkian’s victory may create an opening for a more urgent matter: Washington and Tehran’s joint interest in preventing a full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Pezeshkian is unlikely to cause seismic shifts in Iran’s foreign policy. But given his campaign promises of improving the economy through sanctions relief and direct talks with the United States, as opposed to the previous government’s strategy of “sanctions neutralization” through increased non-dollar trade with Iran’s neighbors, there is an opening worth exploring.
In the short term, however, the main question is primarily one of political will, with the Biden administration so far showing little willingness to respond positively to the diplomatic opening in Tehran. White House spokesperson John Kirby responded to Pezeshkian’s election by flatly rejecting the idea of diplomatic engagement with the new government in Tehran, citing Iran’s support for Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Russia in Ukraine.
But one looming crisis, involving one of those armed groups, is urgent for both sides and could prove to be a cataclysmic geopolitical event that could throw the entire Middle East into turmoil: the spillover of the Gaza war into Lebanon and a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah. According to the Alma Research and Education Center, a full-scale war would be catastrophic for both sides, with thousands of people likely maimed and killed on the Israeli side given Hezbollah’s formidable missile capabilities. Here, Pezeshkian’s victory provides an unexpected opportunity for a rapprochement between Iran and the United States.
A war of such scale will make it immeasurably difficult for the United States not to intervene militarily in support of Israel. Indeed, within days of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, Biden moved an aircraft carrier and other ships to the Eastern Mediterranean to deter Hezbollah from attacking Israel from the north.
Israel’s military operations in Gaza have demonstrated that the country’s armed forces are not prepared to fight a formidable fighting force like Hezbollah, which dwarfs Hamas in virtually every index of military strength, without the United States’ direct involvement in such a war. But direct U.S. military involvement in a Hezbollah-Israel war would inevitably bring U.S. military assets, including U.S. troops, into direct conflict with Hezbollah and its allies, such as Iran.
Recent events have vividly demonstrated the vulnerability of Washington to being drawn into conflicts, even when it is reluctant to do so. This was laid bare in April during the brief but intense military confrontation between Iran and Israel, which was triggered by Israel’s airstrikes on Iran’s consular complex in Damascus. Although Israel had a sophisticated, multilayered, multibillion-dollar air defense system, it took a Herculean effort involving Israeli, French, Jordanian, British, and U.S. forces to intercept Iran’s barrage of drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles.
This effort cost billions of dollars, and despite days of advance warning from Tehran, some Iranian missiles still penetrated Israeli airspace and reached the southern regions of the country, including an air base. This episode exposed the limitations of Israel’s defenses and the extent of its dependence on U.S. assistance.
In the months following this episode, Hezbollah has successfully exposed further cracks in Israel’s much-vaunted Iron Dome missile defense system, making direct U.S. involvement to compensate for the chinks in Israeli armor all the more likely at the earliest phase of a potential war with Hezbollah.
Tehran, too, is vehemently opposed to a full-blown war between Hezbollah and Israel, especially one that would draw the United States back into the Middle East militarily. Iran has correctly concluded that it currently has the upper hand in its rivalry with Israel and that time is on its side. When Iranian generals look at the Israel of today, they see not the once fearsome war machine that could wage war at will but a humiliated and internationally isolated foe that has failed for more than nine months to deliver on its promise to destroy Hamas—a less sophisticated and comparably small military force.
From Iran’s point of view, a full-scale regional conflict involving the United States, Iran, Hezbollah, and Israel is likely to cause severe degradation of Hezbollah’s capabilities, painstakingly and meticulously developed over decades, at a time when Iran and its allies feel they are in a favorable position.
While Iran and the United States prefer to avoid such a scenario, Israeli leaders appear to be of a different mind. The reigning narrative in Israel holds that given Hezbollah’s capacity to pull off a far deadlier attack than what Hamas did on Oct. 7, it has simply become intolerable for Israel to live with Hezbollah on its northern border. Israel simply has no choice but to preventively defeat the Iranian-backed group, so the argument goes. In fact, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project points out that Israel is responsible for 83 percent of the missiles crossing the Israel-Lebanon border.
For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, prolonging the war—any war—can help him avoid facing the wrath of Israeli justice by extending his premiership. Moreover, some in the Israeli leadership see a weakening of Hezbollah, even if it requires U.S. support, as one of the last remaining effective ways to restore deterrence, especially given the poor performance of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza against Hamas, a ragtag militia compared with Hezbollah.
But Israel’s military operations face some constraints. The United States has immense leverage over Israel, which the Biden administration has so far chosen not to use in Gaza to press for a just and durable cease-fire. This reluctance to apply pressure has allowed immense death, suffering, and destruction to be inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza, which has also resulted in Israel’s isolation on the international stage.
Last week’s finding by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal and that it is obliged to vacate all settlements and pay reparations, is just the latest in a series of rulings by the ICJ against Israel. Also, as the continuing escalation of hostilities between Hezbollah and the IDF over the past nine months has demonstrated, it is becoming increasingly difficult to cloister the volatile situation along the Israel-Lebanon border from Israel’s ongoing military assault on Gaza.
Thus far, the bulk of Western efforts to defuse tension along the Israel-Lebanon border has been to convey to Beirut bloodcurdling Israeli threats about returning Lebanon to the Stone Age and wiping it off the map. In effect, the United States has been reduced in stature to a mail carrier whose main task is to help Israel achieve diplomatically what it has failed to achieve militarily: to push Hezbollah above the Litani River in accordance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701.
Washington has an opportunity to be much more effective in achieving a critical U.S. interest: preventing the country and its military from being dragged into yet another Middle East war. Instead of indirectly dealing with Hezbollah, the Biden administration should talk directly to Hezbollah’s main patron, Tehran.
Diplomatic maneuvers to avoid a devastating and potentially imminent regional war are, ultimately, different from renewed nuclear diplomacy. But successful talks with the new Pezeshkian administration over Lebanon can help create better circumstances for nuclear diplomacy down the road.
No one truly knows to what extent Pezeshkian can fulfill his campaign promises about direct U.S.-Iran talks. But the Biden administration would be irresponsible not to find out, especially with stakes this high.
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