The Biden Agenda: Eyes on Iran

Look for plans to return the U.S. to the JCPOA while concerns about regional aggression, terrorism, and more are shunted to the side.

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What will happen in the Middle East if Joe Biden wins the presidency? Europeans are hopeful that a Democratic triumph will mean a U.S. return to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and a generous effort to entreat the Iranians to do likewise. They also want American intervention in the Israeli–Palestinian imbroglio. For both Democrats and Europeans, what had been chiefly a strategic issue (solving problems in the Holy Land mitigates larger dangers in the Middle East and gives the United States and Europe greater standing among Arabs and Muslims) has now become overwhelmingly a moral question (justice for the Palestinians and preserving Israel’s liberal democracy). Often for liberals, moral imperatives are more compelling than badly aged realpolitik.

Likely much more Eurocentric than the Obama administration, a Biden administration will certainly aim to improve transatlantic amity, which has tanked under Trump. Even more than countering Vladimir Putin’s machinations in Eastern Europe, the Middle East will likely become the arena where Biden will try to achieve common cause with our NATO allies.

But will a President Biden have much success on either issue? The Middle East has been in freefall since the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the Great Arab Revolt, less accurately known as the Arab Spring, that started to rock the region seven years later. The United States has been scaling down in the Middle East since 2009. That surely isn’t going to change with Biden. He carries the scars of the Iraq War that he once ardently supported. He will likely seek significant cuts in American defense spending despite armed force being the sine qua non of the region.

Beyond Iran, Israel, and the Palestinians, might the arrival of Biden bring any other changes to U.S. policy in the region—and will those changes actually matter?

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  1. Eric B

    I just looked up the term "Zionism". Is it accurate to say it defines an effort (which appears to have been successful) to extend Israel's borders to include Palestine? Like if Canada decided it owned Alaska and appealed to China to help assert ownership.

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      James Spiller

      All Israel is formed from Palestine, so yes, Zionism, which is the belief that Israel should exist, would require some of Palestine to be Israeli. It is possible you mean the Palestinian Territories, with the “Palestinian” in that word referring to the people rather than to “Palestine”. Israel was formed with some international support. I’m not sure who the equivalent of China is in the 1947-49 war, but the militaries involved where exclusively Israeli on one side and exclusively from Arab countries on the other. This is often portrayed as having a numerically inferior, heroic, Israel fighting hordes of their neighbors, but the Israeli army was larger than the coalition it faced; the coalition represented countries with a much larger population, but without great capacity for force projection logistics. That Arab-Israeli war, and those that followed it, until the 1970s, are the period in which “ownership”, in the sense of de facto control, was asserted decided. More recently, Gaza was granted a higher degree of independence, but that doesn’t seem similar to your hypothetical.

      If you’re referring to the situation today, more enthusiastic zionists will sometimes draw larger borders, and while the Gaza border is fairly clear, there are genuine disputes about the border of the West Bank. There is no foreign country, however, that plays a major role in the governance of either the West Bank nor the Gaza Strip (or, at least, not in support of Israel; Iran puts considerable resources into domination of Palestinian politics). It may be that we have another Lebanese war in the future, or that there’s another Intifada, although that latter seems less likely. Since the fall of Saddam, though, and even more so since the fall of Ben Ali and Qaddafi and the relative fall of Assad, there’s been no power closer than Iran that has taken great interest in the Palestinian cause. With the sting taken out of enforcement of anti-semitism in the Arab League, there’s not nearly as much international involvement in the status of the West Bank as there once was. It’s possible that at some point in the future a shift in domestic politics in Iran will leave the area relatively peaceful and Israel able to create an arrangement comfortable for both sides. Sadly, Biden doesn’t seem likely to help with that, but there’s every chance that Biden’s successor might, and we may have time.

      Of course, Iranian nuclearization could put a stop to that, and do so overnight.

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      1. Eric B

        Thank you for that really excellent response. And I see how my Alaska analogy doesn't work. Regarding Palestine vs Palestinian, I was only recalling to mind news reports that I heard of Israel building settlements in Palestinian areas and the ongoing clashes, so perhaps they have something to do with the West Bank and the disputed border.
        I'm encouraged to hear that there's growing opportunity for international relationships to adopt a more constructive tone. Every bit of progress helps. Hopefully Biden's people will be prepared to respond appropriately if called upon.
        I've read that the lessening of international reach from the USA is part of the shift toward diplomatic normalization with Israel. I can't tell from that if, from the perspective of those in the middle East, that's a good development or not but I should leave that question alone for now.

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          James Spiller

          If you read someone who tells you that there is a Middle Eastern opinion on a thing, you should generally consider whether there is a single American opinion on that thing. On reflecting that there is considerable diversity of viewpoints in America, but that a writer talking to either a foreign or parochial audience may be able to present a view of unity, it may be easier to appreciate that the “Middle Eastern” view will generally be either a boogeyman or the view of those in the Middle East who agree with the author.

          In terms of the impact on the Middle East from American influence toppling the worst anti-Semitic leaders in the region, I wrote on that in reply to Doug. If American withdrawal leads ultimately to Assad returning to full power, to Turkey radicalizing in hostility to Israel, and to Iran taking over Iraq and Lebanon, and to radicals taking over Libya and Yemen, or to various Antisemites gaining control of nuclear weapons (putting Iran to one side, recall that even a close Saudi alliance would not mean that there were not vicious Antisemites in the Saudi government and military, and that nuclear restraint requires not only that policy be to abstain from use, but also that no one less restrained could seize them), then those would be things that made Israel less safe. If the region is left more peacefully, that’s probably a handy thing for Israel. Obviously, even what I am saying is an absurd simplification, but the more absurd the simplification the less likely that you’re learning something useful.

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    Earl King

    This alone should keep anyone from voting for Biden. Whether or not the original 10 year deal is reinstated it was always designed to fail. Either way Iran was going to get a nuclear bomb. Why? Because they want one regardless of what the world thinks. NOKO is exactly the same thing. The Mullahs don't care about economic expansion nor peaceful trade, it quite obvious they don't care about their population.....These are secular things that don't impact people who simply are planning on going to paradise. Iran is a fanatical regime, no different that NOKO. I believe them when they say they want to blown Israel of the face of the earth...Why other don't has always been a mystery to me. We made the calculation the Russians did not want to commit suicide....I don't think the same can be said of the Iranians.

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      James Spiller

      The ten year timeframe provides another reason for hurrying. It’s five years now. If Biden were to get it done at the end of his first term, he’d only be purchasing a year of reduced activity, which is probably not enough to get support.

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  3. DJ

    "Eighteen months have passed since Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA, and the world hasn’t ended"

    Relatedly, Bush was a compassionate conservative who opposed nation building on September 10, 2001.

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    The Bell Tower

    We can dispense with the phony Democratic lament for “moderation” through lifting of sanctions. The driving force is money, and if you think Boeing, Honeywell, GE and other American companies who stand to gain financially from lifting those sanctions aren’t putting money and support behind such an effort, I have a bridge to sell you.

    This is ironic coming from the party that eternally harrumphs about blood for oil and the military industrial complex. And speaking of hypocrisy, when you say Javad-Zarif, do you mean the guy who has described hanging homosexuals as adhering to moral principles? His Twitter account still seems to be functioning just fine. Good thing he hasn’t tried to criticize Hunter Biden....

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      Paul Reichardt

      I can’t disagree with this statement that financial incentives often drive desired policy changes. But that argument goes in every direction. US foreign policy has largely become the domain of shakedown artists, grifters, lobbyists, and ideologues and there are swamps as far as the eye can see.

      Lockheed Martin’s about to make serious bank on the Trump UAE deals (https://www.investors.com/news/f35-uae-fighter-jet-sale-cleared-congress/) Who do you think benefits from all those Saudi arms deals?
      https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/25/defense-contractors-stand-with-white-house-saudi-arms-sales/

      And remember when Trump said we should just “take their oil”? That’s exactly what he did. We just sold off a tanker full of Iranian gas bound for Venezuela and pocketed the cash. That’s just petty theft on the high seas.
      http://almon.co/3es3

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    Nick H

    One possibility here is that a Biden administration would actively pursue getting the other Gulf states to normalize relations with Israel. Then they'll claim that it proves that this was all going to happen anyway and therefore Trump doesn't deserve any credit for it.

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    George.Skinner

    Sanctions on Iranian oil just don't have the bite they once had. The regime had to adapt to reduced income from oil during the earlier sanctions regime, and now low oil prices effectively throttle oil revenue anyway. The Iranian nuclear program is a concern, but it's not like there are many good options to counter it. Obama clearly fixated on a deal with Iran as a legacy item, and probably kept pushing it despite a declining ratio of costs to benefits. Going forward, it's time to look at other ways to hasten the collapse of an increasingly unpopular regime in Iran. A US role is tricky, as American culture and society remain attractive to many Iranians, but the history of US interference in Iranian affairs means American involvement in regime change is likely to undermine any movement in that direction.

    As for the Palestinian issue, I don't know that much is going to change if Biden becomes president. The more left-wing elements of the Democratic party continue to champion the Palestinian underdog, but the failure of Clinton's attempt at a deal in 2000 and the 2nd intifada effectively killed the whole idea of negotiating a 2 state solution. The Palestinians were offered almost everything they wanted, and they wouldn't or couldn't take the deal. Other than being more critical of Israeli settlement policy again, I can't see Biden or the Democratic foreign policy establishment expending any significant effort on an issue that even the Arab governments don't care about anymore.

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      James Spiller

      Arab apathy doesn’t mean academic apathy; Middle Eastern governments were never the primary providers of pressure in Democratic primaries.

      A direct US role in Iranian politics seems like something to avoid, but personalized sanctions such as currently exist seem to be effective at annoying the ruling classes (particularly, as the voluminous anecdata suggests, the spouses of decision makers), and the defeat of Iranian foreign adventures (primarily Libya, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, to a lesser extent Venezuela) would be highly effective in reducing public support for them. It’s one thing to undergo great suffering to push back the Little and Great Satan’s from the region. It’s another thing entirely to undergo great suffering to no result. We can support our allies in the region without engaging in a lot of conspiracies.

      That said, the Democratic platform includes essentially nothing about opposing Russia or Iran (opposition to Russia includes essentially all opposition to Iran as well as other theaters that Iran has no involvement in, such as Ukraine, ownership of western newspapers, and such). It seems surprising that Biden doesn’t face more pressure to be anti-Putin given the last four years, but he was one of Putin’s greatest advocates for eight years, so even if the advocacy appears, he is unlikely to be helpful to American interests in that regard.

      Which isn’t to say that he’s not better than Trump on many issues; on balance, I greatly prefer Biden. But his foreign policy is worse, trade aside, than arguably the worst modern President on the subject.

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  7. Daniel Rabiner

    " All admit that the administration’s unilateral sanctions proved vastly more effective than the Democratic foreign-policy establishment, multilateralists all, thought possible. But the Democrats primarily want to trade money and commerce for limited nuclear restraint (Iranian officials in their prouder moments described this as extortion). They don’t want to reaffirm Trump’s idea that economic coercion is a critical diplomatic tool."

    How have they been effective? Iran's government is still there. People are suffering. Iran has started to modestly start their nuclear program.

    Next you'll say that the sanctions have been successful in Venezuela too.

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    1. DJ

      Exactly. The fact is that the US has lost leverage, the rest of the world hates us, the UN just gave the finger to Mike Pompeo for trying to enforce and agreement we are not party to.

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    Pat Riot

    Foreign policy is simply not a live issue in national politics anymore because there's a general consensus that we're going to try all kinds of strategies and muddle along through various problems that have no solutions.

    If there was a difference between Trump and everybody else, it was Trump's moronic belief that the USA could/should crap on all of our allies so we can isolate ourselves and deal with every individual country unilaterally. That plan was so plainly stupid that Trump didn't so much accomplish it as embarrass our country trying.

    The only way to deal with Iran, China and Russia is to use our American *values* to win the war. That means locking the Western world in a tight alliance that can successfully execute economic pressure on these countries.

    On that note, in a typical example of Trump's *actual* foreign policy, Turkey was busy making our sanctions on Iran meaningless by creating a funnel of Western money for the country. Then Trump--who owns Trump Towers Istanbul--hobbled the DOJ investigation into the Turkish bank laundering the money.

    In other words, Trump neither knows nor cares anything about foreign policy, only his personal gain:


    https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/trump-turkey-bank-scandal-corruption-erdogan-halkbank-conflict-interest.html

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    DougAz

    I don't fear an armed nuclear Iran any more than I did fear Soviet Union in the late 50s and 60s. Crawled under desks.

    These are realities:
    1. The more the US pulls out of the Middle East, the more Israel has its crutch removed. Israel will have peace with Arab neighbors made far faster on their own. No US involvement in Saudi, Israel, Iraq.. it will all get better by necessity.

    2. Gerecht generally makes my long standing arguement, that the US made its largest Strategic Mistake of the last 100 years, by invading Iraq. Flawed, and fraudulent premise. Lies. Coverups.

    3. Saddam Hussein used to be an American Ally against Iran.

    4. Like China, when America through the portals of China-Mart, and the worlds largest private and most important company, Hon-Hai Industries, e.g. Foxconn (Formerly Taiwan based, now China), - American transferred millions of jobs, millions of small businesses to China. In return, without one single Democratic or Republican politician involved, created 250 million middle class Chinese - who live "mother Russia" have a deeply vested interest in peace, and certainly not ever a nuclear conflict.

    5. So, America will not be the guiding hand for either North Korea, and its missles and nukes, nor so for Iran. China has arrived on the global security stage, and has generally, strongly vested interest in self-preservation, peace.

    Time to leave the Middle East. Put the money back into America.

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      James Spiller

      1. In what sense is peace “necessary”? In the past, there has been open war, which demonstrates that peace was not required then. What has changed?
      2. The most obvious thing that has changed is that none of the people who used to enforce anti-Zionism in the Arab League are still in a position to do so. Saddam was the leading figure, Qaddafi a distant second, with Assad and Ben Ali following. Peace with Israel without a settlement of the Palestinian issue was inconceivable, and a resolution of the Palestinian issue implausible. That doesn’t make the invasion of Iraq worthwhile, but it is one of its impacts.
      3. Saddam was never an American ally. This is an absurd and disgusting lie that is regrettably commonly believed. The chief basis for it is that during the 1980s the US briefly reduced sanctions against Iraq, selling resources at a time when Iraq badly needed them. Also during the 1980s, the US provided a similar level of support to Iran; Reagan was almost impeached for it. But, no, Iran was not a US ally, either. If you look at the inventory for the Iraqi military, you will quickly see that although it was about 2% American, it was generally Soviet. Likewise if you look at Iraqi trade and civilian entanglement.

      “Allies” don’t demonstrate their affection for each other by slightly reducing sanctions. Allies don’t have sanctions against each other to reduce. And that is at the greatest moment of American affection for Iraq; before 2003, America had fought a large scale war against Iraq, again, not something commonly found in relationships called “alliances”, followed by imposing a sanctions regime that the UN absurdly claimed killed half a million kids. Clinton launched air strikes against them. People talk about Carter “supporting” Iraq by giving a “green light” for the invasion of Iran, but this is both probably not true, and would not constitute an alliance if it were; not joining a war on the other side is different to joining a war in support. Every President during Saddam’s time in power implemented sanctions and went to lengths to restrict him, often to the point of major and overt armed strikes against him.

      It is true that Saddam sometimes opposed Iran, but they also frequently cooperated against the US and Israel. Relationships between Iran and Iraq, the two halves of various historic Persian empires (traditionally ruled from Iraq), are complex and nuanced. Iraq today, likewise. There has never been a time when Farsi has not been spoken in Iraqi halls of power, by Iraqi politicians (at least, not in the last few millennia).

      Iraqi support for sanctions against Iran was essential to the JCPOA being implemented; there would have been few meaningful sanctions to trade away if Iraq had not enforced them. On the other hand, democratic Iraq has often worked with Iran, particularly after ISIS invaded and Iran, but not the US or any other Western power, provided support in a timely manner. The current Iraqi PM is a pretty good American ally, although it is somewhat difficult for anyone to be an ally with Trump and it is likely that Biden will also be difficult to work with.

      4. Trade is not a negative sum game; jobs were not “transferred” to China, but created in China by the Chinese and American removal of barriers to trade and by the domestic creation of markets and reimposition of the rule of law after the Cultural Revolution.

      It is true that we avoided nuclear war through the Cold War. It should go without saying, though, that we repeatedly came to the brink, to the point where one or two people had hard decisions to make and that we are fortunate that each time this game of chicken happened the relevant actors decided to flinch. The fact that we engaged in a bunch of dice rolls without coming up snake eyes should not tell us that the dice lack single pip faces. You have, so far, avoided dying of Covid, as have I. That ought not to tell us that there is no reason to be concerned.

      Iranian nuclear incentives are different to Soviet. In the early days of the nuclear age, the US repeatedly came close to using nukes. The Soviet development of nuclear technology was the chief reason that those talks mostly petered out; after Korea, nuclear warfare was essentially exclusively discussed in the context of a total annihilation of at least one superpower.

      Iran doesn’t face the same issue; no one thinks Iran wants to totally conquer the world or the US, meaning that the incentives of MAD are different. An Iranian nuke smuggled into or near Tel Aviv or NYC could be set off with deniability in the first instance, and a set of reasonable requests in the second, once tempers had cooled a little. If we were told that there was a second bomb hidden in Jerusalem, or a few in LA, DC, and Houston, do you think that public pressure would favor murdering a couple of Holocausts worth of Iranian civilians to make a point about revenge? At the cost of losing another city ourselves? Because the Soviet demands were existential, the response could be so. Because Iranian demands are mostly about leaving the Middle East, they’re not so for us. They are for Israel; if an Iranian nuke goes off anywhere, it should be clear to Israelis that they cannot safely live there. If the initial bomb is in Tel Aviv, enough people would want their families safe elsewhere that the remaining territory would be unsustainable. But Israel doesn’t stand to benefit from massive revenge killing, either; nuking Iran would merely accelerate and make certain the removal of Israel from the map. The issues are different, just as the issues would have been different with the Russians if we’d had Stalin governing longer.

      5. China engages in very little force projection. It simply isn’t interested in peacekeeping. You won’t find China stepping up meaningfully in Somalia to fight piracy, despite Chinese interest in shipping lanes. You won’t find China reducing violence in Ukraine, Syria, or Venezuela. And if there were to be nukes set off in Tel Aviv or NYC, China would benefit by the metrics that most Chinese leaders talk about. China would be poorer, for sure; everywhere would be. But it would be a world in which America was much, much, more cautious about American force projection, a world in which Taiwan had to come to terms with Chinese rule pretty quickly. And, you know, Japan. The liberal international order benefits America because America does not want to engage in wars of conquest; there is no part of the world that America would like to become part of America that is not currently so (maybe Greenland). If you ask Indians, Tibetans, and such, you will find that China is not quite so committed to this. Taiwan is independent because, although China beat America in Korea, it lacked the naval power to replicate that in Taiwan and the taboo on nuclear destruction meant that the war would plausibly remain conventional, as Korea did.

      American revenue from the MENA being as peaceful as it is greater than American costs. We’re spending trivial amounts of money at the moment. This was not true when the Iraq war was fought on a larger scale; for a while we were spending real money. But we’d have less money in America if we replaced our trading in the region with increased spending on refugees, hostage rescues, replacements for destroyed American institutions, and such.

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        DougAz

        I always appreciate the quality time you make for your responses James.

        The extent of American involvement with Iran..who we supported strongly up until 1979, Iraq and chemical weapons or components from the US, is little known to us in the public.

        https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-prove-america-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran/

        You may have a point that Iranians, and their military and religious leaders care less about living than the Russians of the Cold War as a nuclear deterrent. Probably because Russia has centuries of generally evolving civil government..even Czars..in a relative sense. Russia also had the "benefit" of Hiroshima close in time, dozens of nuclear tests, and really understood what they had...Iran.. not so much

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      Paul Reichardt

      The counter-argument here is that YOU may not fear a nuclear Iran, but the Gulf States, Turkey, and Egypt do and they are in the process of going nuclear too. Once the Saudis have nukes, its only a matter of time before few 10s of kgs of fissile material goes "missing" and ends up in Berlin, London, or New York.

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        DougAz

        Certainly possible. But I suspect an Israeli-Saudi Nuclear pact will emerge, or has... in their own self-interests.
        The skills making a Nuclear weapon are pretty available... getting the material...another story.

        Still, what actions will stop that possibility? Pakistan, India, China, Israel all are Nuclear and all what.. a 20 minute flight?

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  10. Pedro Goulart

    FDD....should I even bother to read?

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      Paul Reichardt

      If you've read one, you've read them all.
      https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2020/05/29/regime-change-iran-taboo/

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