Interview — Stay the Course of Maximum Pressure

How has the situation changed over the last four years?

One major strategic change was President Trump’s decision to impose maximum pressure on the Islamic Republic and move away from the Obama policy, which was centered on the Iran nuclear deal of 2015. The Obama administration defended that deal as permanently cutting off Iran’s pathway to nuclear weapons. The Trump administration objected to that characterization because of provisions in the JCPOA under which key restrictions would go away and because the deal did not address the full range of Iran’s malignant conduct. So it withdrew from the deal in 2018, reimposed sanctions and then launched a campaign over two and a half years of intense and relentless economic pressure on the regime that provoked significant economic and political crises for the mullahs.

Iran’s grip in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Syria diminished as it found itself without the resources to maintain funding levels for its proxies and allies. Then there were a series of high-profile assassinations, including the killing of Qasem Soleimani in 2020 and the recent killing, we think by the Mossad, of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who oversaw Iran’s nuclear weapons development for more than two decades. Between those two assassinations was the Israeli killing of Al-Masri, the number two Al-Qaeda commander, on the streets of Tehran. These killings showed that when the U.S. and Israel cooperate, they can inflict significant damage on the regime in Iran. The Israelis demonstrated that Iran was not ten feet tall, despite the perception in Washington that if we escalated against Iran it would lead to World War III. That obviously didn’t happen.

There were also the Abraham Accords, which effectively ended the Arab-Israeli conflict and brought together Israeli and Arab assets against threats from Iran. The accords reflect a recognition by a number of Arab leaders that the real threat does not come from Jerusalem but from Tehran, and that Israeli power is going to be indispensable to take on the Iranians. With the United States pivoting out of the Middle East to the Pacific, the only country in the region with the military and intelligence capabilities to take on the Islamic Republic is Israel.

What do you think the Biden administration’s approach to Iran should be?

It should continue this trajectory of maximum pressure and Arab-Israeli normalization, and it should not go back into the six-year-old JCPOA. The strategic picture in the Middle East has fundamentally changed, and America has significant leverage to negotiate a follow-up agreement, which, as Biden has suggested, is necessary to address some of the fundamental flaws of the 2015 agreement. It makes very little sense to preemptively give up your leverage by going back to the JCPOA, withdrawing all of these sanctions, having hundreds of billions of dollars flow back into the coffers of the mullahs, giving them the financial resources to head off this intensified economic and political crisis. It will be very difficult for the Biden administration to restore leverage and pressure once they’ve lifted it. Their fundamental miscalculation is believing that they can easily snap back the sanctions in the face of Iranian nuclear escalation. To do this you need a president who’s willing to go it alone and defy the Europeans, the Chinese and the Russians. There will be huge disagreement over whether and how to do it and I’ve seen no evidence that President Biden will be willing to defy his allies.

The Israelis demonstrated that Iran was not ten feet tall, despite the perception in Washington that if we escalated against Iran it would lead to World War III. That obviously didn’t happen.

The Biden administration will also make a fundamental mistake if it goes back into the JCPOA in the face of opposition from Republicans, Israelis, Saudis, Emiratis, Bahrainis, Moroccans, Egyptians—you name it. They keep believing that it’s our European allies that matter the most, but they are not in Iranian missile range. Also, this whipsawing of U.S. policy is not healthy for a superpower. That’s why I think it’s incumbent upon the Biden team not to repeat the mistake of 2015. They need to rally bipartisan support, and support from our key Middle Eastern allies.

How will Israel affect the U.S. policy toward Iran?

I hope that the Biden administration learns the lesson that a well-coordinated good cop-bad cop strategy with Netanyahu is more effective than a huge clash between the president and the prime minister, like what occurred in 2015. The Israelis are demonstrating what we always want a U.S. ally to do, which is to project power and do the things that we may not want to do. We should do everything we can to leverage that ally, and the Gulf Arabs as well, to do as much damage to the Islamic Republic as possible.

Should COVID-19 be a factor in U.S. Iranian policy?

Iran certainly has suffered severely from COVID-19, and I’m sure that will be used as a pretext for sanctions relief. Legitimately, there are certain types of targeted sanctions relief that I think would be useful from a humanitarian perspective. The question is how much of Iran’s humanitarian claims are legitimate and how much are propaganda. The regime has not acknowledged the extent of the crisis, so the numbers are much greater than the official ones. This has created a huge trade problem for Iran, as countries have shut their borders to prevent the spread of the virus. Even with sanctions relief, the regime is going to have a hard time rebuilding its economy.

Mark Dubowitz is chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, DC-based policy institute, and is co-chair of the Project on U.S. Middle East Nonproliferation Strategy. FDD is a nonpartisan think tank focused on foreign policy and national security issues.