Opinion: Biden should follow President Trump’s lead on Iran

Editor’s note: Mark Dubowitz is CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Jonathan Schanzer is senior vice president of research. FDD is a nonpartisan research organization based in Washington that focuses on national security and foreign policy. Follow me on X @MDubowitz and @JSchanzer. The opinions expressed in this commentary are their own.view more opinions On CNN.

CNN
—

The incident, which killed three U.S. service members and injured more than 40 others in Jordan on Sunday, is just the latest and deadliest example of Iran-backed militias targeting U.S. forces in the Middle East. Sunday’s drone attack came just weeks after two Navy SEALs were killed trying to thwart an arms smuggling operation by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia off the coast of Somalia.Meanwhile, US goals at least remain 165 types of attacks It has been carried out by Iranian-backed militias since mid-October.

Slowly but surely, the Islamic Republic of Iran drew the United States into wars unfolding across the Middle East. The Houthis have largely cut off international trade in the Red Sea, the main shipping route from Asia to Europe. And it is Iran that is helping finance and supply the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations currently fighting Israel.

It is clear that President Joe Biden is anxious to avoid a broader war in the region. But the Iranian regime has the right to vote and appears to have no intention of backing down.

Throughout the fall, the Biden administration avoided divisive language. The president said after this weekend that he had decided to respond to “Iran-backed extremist militant groups” operating in Iraq and Syria, but did not say what that response would be. But rockets, drones, and surgical strikes on Iranian proxy warehouses (which the United States has largely done so far in response to attacks on U.S. military bases over the past three months) are not enough to thwart the violence. Not enough to end it.

The United States must be prepared to use force directly against Iran, including its expanding nuclear weapons program. Fears of sparking wider conflict in the wake of the failure of the “war on terror” are understandable. However, refusing to respond to proxy aggression is often seen by the Iranian government as an invitation to escalate. And that’s exactly what the administration has been doing since October.

Retired Gen. Wesley Clark spoke to CNN on Sunday about the expected U.S. response. “If we do this attack the right way, the Iranians will understand that we cannot escalate to war,” Clark said. “They cannot stand up to the United States,” especially given the domestic opposition the administration faces. “The position of this government in Iran is very unstable and it is not in a position to go to war with the United States,” he added, suggesting it was time to “get to the root of Iran’s problems.”

Republican senators, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Roger Wicker, Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, are also calling on the president to take such action.

Sadly, some of Biden’s current challenges to Iran are of his own making. A policy of non-confrontation, punctuated by occasional limited and proportionate strikes against Iranian-backed proxies, gives Tehran itself a free pass, an approach adopted by the Obama administration that should embolden Iran. Ta.

According to the JINSA Iranian Projectile Tracking Survey, President Donald Trump’s use of sanctions pressure and U.S. military power has resulted in fewer Iranian aggressions than under the Biden administration. The think tank’s tracking documents Iran’s malign activities, including missile attacks, maritime invasions, cyber intrusions and hacking, kidnappings and false imprisonment, terrorist attacks, and weapons testing and production.

Biden reflexively returned to the previous status quo. The regime’s combination of billions of dollars in sanctions relief in the form of weak sanctions enforcement that led to a surge in Iranian oil sales and Iranian revenues, and easing international pressure on Tehran’s nuclear program, has benefited the Islamic Republic. It just brought.

Using this handover, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) poured weapons capabilities into the terrorist ally, funded operations, trained fighters, and provided overall strategic direction. The administration continued to fund proxy forces under Trump, but his “maximum pressure campaign” gave the administration tens of billions of dollars that would otherwise have gone to proxy forces and the economy. There wasn’t. As a result, proxy funding was reduced as the Iranian currency collapsed. Today, the regime’s proxies, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other militias, are more powerful than ever.

And all this could get even worse. The escalation of war in the Middle East is an attempt to distract the public from obscuring one of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s most important goals: pursuing a nuclear program that would allow his regime to produce weapons of mass destruction. It may function as a “weapon to deflect.”

The administration is currently enriching uranium to levels just short of 90% weapons grade, thwarting UN weapons inspectors, and working to build another underground facility that could be impervious to American and Israeli bombs. I’m here. Overall, Iran is on the verge of a nuclear weapon, accumulating enough enriched uranium to produce weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear device in just 12 days.

Despite repeated denials from the White House, our organization, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has reported that since May 2018, when President Trump withdrew the United States from the 2015 nuclear deal, and since Biden’s election, It was discovered that the most dangerous stage in the expansion of the development plan has been carried out. However, some of this is due to Iran’s preliminary steps toward developing a nuclear weapon, such as enrichment using advanced centrifuges and violating caps on enrichment and heavy water levels imposed under the 2015 nuclear deal. It was planted during the term of President Trump, who began taking steps to

However, in our assessment, these were temporary and incremental steps compared to the massive expansion of Iran’s nuclear program under the Biden administration. As we charted, the administration remained cautious in the face of President Trump’s willingness to use punitive sanctions and military force.

This changed development under the Biden administration is easy to explain. The administration has abandoned President Trump’s fiscal pressure campaign (which Biden had derided as counterproductive) and has shown no signs of threatening military force. It then granted Khamenei access to billions of dollars in frozen oil funds while China froze them. He bought hundreds of millions of barrels of Iranian oil. Therefore, Iran saw no downside to expanding its nuclear program.

We opposed the Iran nuclear deal that President Obama accepted from the beginning. Those who argue that President Trump made a mistake in withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear deal, or that maximum pressure did not work, argue that the deal itself means that Iran has no plans to develop a nuclear program over the next decade. They overlook the fact that they were able to expand legally and were about to reach a breaking point. The activation of nuclear weapons capabilities starting in 2030 would curtail the country’s nuclear program over the next decade, but our organization estimates it would also provide $1 trillion in sanctions relief. Had the U.S. kept the deal, Biden might now be facing an even wealthier opponent.

A deadline is looming for the United States to introduce a bill that would waive pressure on Iran after Hamas started the war on October 7. The White House acknowledged this, at least in part, by redesignating the Houthis as a terrorist organization after delisting them in 2021 (a move it explained was due to humanitarian concerns). (although it may have been a preemptive concession to Tehran).president left many loopholes that terrorists could exploit According to our analysis.

That’s not to say President Trump’s policies were perfect. Far from it. But numbers don’t lie. Thanks to aggressive sanctions enforcement, Iranian oil sales plummeted from 2.5 million barrels per day in January 2017 to between 100,000 and 350,000 barrels per day in June 2020 (and 1.29 million barrels per day in 2023). (returned to barrels), Iran’s fully accessible foreign exchange reserves fell to $4. From a high of $122 billion in 2018, he has increased to $1 billion (as of 2022, he is back to $21 billion).

Trump also dealt a military blow by ordering the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the feared Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force who had built Iran’s proxy forces into a deadly fighting force. And he encouraged domestic opposition to the regime by expressing support for the Iranian masses opposed to the regime. As a result, the Islamic Republic’s economy stagnated, the regime’s aggression appeared to slow, and its nuclear activities ceased for months after Soleimani’s death.

The maximum pressure campaign lasted just two years until President Trump’s election defeat in 2020. Shortly after, Biden ended his policy. If left alone, it might have produced even more fruit.

Mr. Biden may not want to acknowledge Mr. Trump’s relative success in an election year. But nevertheless, he should revive the maximum pressure policy and leave his own mark on it. He can do that by taking on things that President Trump could have done better, such as providing maximum aid to the Iranian people.

Support for Iranian dissidents should include: Deploying technological platforms that allow Iranians to evade regime surveillance; Declassify information about internal security forces’ movements in support of Iranian protests. Develop a labor fund to finance Iranians participating in strikes. Isolate the regime in all international forums. and greatly expand security for brave Iranian dissidents abroad. Biden could also direct U.S. officials to speak out more forcefully against regime leaders and security forces that have killed, tortured and sexually abused protesters.

Indeed, the president’s advisers will view the prospect of engaging in new conflict in an election year as dangerous in itself. However, failure to adequately respond to the Islamic Republic’s continued aggression will lead to a wider war.