U.S. Fixation on Nuclear Deal Let Iran Loose on the Middle East

The United States has dropped the ball on Iran. Had Washington come up with a comprehensive strategy to address Tehran’s destabilizing role in the Middle East, the spreading conflict between Iran and its proxies on the one side and Israel and its allies on the other might have been prevented. Today’s escalating conflict in the Middle East—which on April 13 saw the first-ever direct attack on Israel by Iran—is not least the result of an inconsistent, shortsighted, and overly compartmentalized U.S. policy toward Iran for more than a decade.

Since the first administration of President Barack Obama, Washington has focused its attention almost entirely on Iran’s nuclear program, all but overlooking its other activities—including its interventions across the region. Already during Obama’s campaign for his first term in 2008, he promised to make a nuclear deal with Iran his top priority for the Middle East, which he duly sought to implement once in office.

Early in the process, there was a clear imbalance between Washington’s perception and Tehran’s. Washington thought that engaging Iran on the nuclear file would curb the latter’s destabilizing potential in the region, and this assumption motivated the signing of an initial nuclear agreement with Iran in 2013. But Iran celebrated the agreement as a political victory and otherwise carried on. Despite this, the Obama administration pressed on in pursuit of a wider nuclear deal, and in 2015 managed to secure the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

As the Obama administration was negotiating its deals, two significant developments took place in Iran that failed to set off any kind of rethink in Washington. The first was the Green Movement, a nationwide wave of protests against the manipulated 2009 election that gave Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term. The Iranian authorities crushed the movement with sheer violence. In 2011, popular protests also erupted in Syria as part of the Arab Spring. Iran was quick to deploy its advisors to help Syrian President Bashar al-Assad crush the protests, turning a peaceful uprising into a long and bloody war that continues to this day.

During this time, Iran was also developing its ballistic missile program. But none of these developments shifted Washington’s focus away from the objective of the nuclear deal. Once again, U.S. and Iranian perceptions varied greatly.

Washington’s logic was that nuclear enrichment was the greatest threat that Iran was posing in the Middle East—and the U.S. side theorized that cooperation on this issue, in return for lifting sanctions, would build trust. This trust, according to Washington, would then be the basis upon which Iran could be engaged on other issues such as its missile program and its interventions in the Middle East. This misplaced hope not only failed to account for Iranian political realities, but it was also shortsighted in allowing Iran to expand both its missile program and regional interventions.

This myopic fixation of the Obama years is today repeated by the Biden administration, which has been similarly focused on the nuclear deal while largely ignoring Iran’s other destabilizing activities.

But even the administration of former President Donald Trump did not deviate much from the path set by Obama and now followed by President Joe Biden. In 2018, Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA and announced the start of a so-called maximum pressure campaign toward Iran. Yet his administration did not come up with any plan for dealing with the ballistic missile program or regional interventions—despite Iran’s activities in Syria having become more extensive than they were during Obama’s time in office.

Iran never fully abided by the terms of the JCPOA, but the U.S. withdrawal from the deal gave Tehran the opportunity to publicly blame Washington, increasing Iran’s political capital among its supporters. And although Trump used the term “maximum pressure” to describe his Iran strategy, the reality was that the measures taken by Washington were actually not very maximal. They amounted to the designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—a branch of the Iranian military—as a terrorist organization in 2019, the assassination of IRGC elite commander Qassem Suleimani in 2020, and the imposition of additional sanctions.

The Trump administration’s measures did not cause Iran to modify its behavior. If anything, Iran became more emboldened. The terrorist designation did little to curb the IRGC’s financial transactions because the group does not rely on international banking networks. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration that the United States implemented the designation at his “request” only served to support Iran’s narrative that it was defying victimization by its enemies. Suleimani’s assassination did not cause the IRGC to crumble, and it carried on its destabilizing activities. And while Iran did suffer financially from sanctions, they have not been sufficient to cause a change in the regime’s behavior.

Iran also benefited from the lukewarm reaction of the Trump administration to the attacks orchestrated by Iran and its proxies against U.S. targets in the Middle East. Washington blamed Tehran for the 2019 attack by Yemen’s Houthis on a critical Aramco oil facility in Saudi Arabia—but it never came up with a robust policy toward Yemen itself. That failure is now vividly playing out in the context of the Israel-Hamas war.

In the eyes of Tehran, Washington also lost credibility due to its lack of political and military pushback. When IRGC speedboats harassed U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf in 2020, the United States chose not to respond. Later that year, the Trump administration failed in its bid to extend a U.N. arms embargo on Iran, which expired in October 2020; instead, Washington ended up imposing this embargo unilaterally.

Iran saw this scenario as confirming the United States’ diplomatic isolation. When Washington imposed more sanctions on Tehran that same year, the latter’s response was to increase nuclear enrichment.

Iran also benefited from U.S. inattention to the former’s ongoing regional interventions, which continued across the administrations of Obama, Trump, and Biden. This inattention allowed the Houthis to consolidate their position in Yemen, helped the Assad regime stay in power, and enabled Hezbollah to become the most powerful political actor in Lebanon. Other Iran-backed armed groups in the Middle East, including Hamas, also profited from this situation, acquiring more weapons, funding, and training from Iran.

After 15 years of half-baked, myopic U.S. policies toward Iran, it should not come as a surprise that the Middle East is now at war—started on Oct. 7, 2023, by an Iran-backed armed group, Hamas, whose escalatory aggressiveness is, to no small extent, the result of a failed U.S. strategy toward Iran.

Iran’s apparent resilience is not simply the product of its own strength, but also largely a consequence of U.S. strategic ineptitude. In other words, U.S. behavior has aided Iran’s ability to act as a destabilizing force in the Middle East.

If there is a silver lining to the events since October, it is that the conflict has shown Iran to be isolated and vulnerable. When Iran attacked Israel, the latter’s Western allies and Arab partners actively aided in its defense. Iran, for all its network of proxies, lacks such a robust defense network.

This could be a golden opportunity for the United States to shift gears in its handling of Iran. A new strategy should include stronger engagement with Washington’s regional allies to create a viable security framework for the Middle East, taking the lead on the Syrian and Yemeni peace processes, and resurrecting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in a way that includes and addresses Iran’s role.

Unfortunately, there are still no signs that the United States is prepared to craft a comprehensive Iran policy that seriously addresses Tehran’s threat to regional stability. U.S. policy on Iran has echoes of its Syria policy, through which the Obama administration’s inaction led to horrific consequences.

As long as the United States maintains a similarly passive stance on Iran, the Middle East will continue to reel from Tehran’s destabilizing actions.