COMMENT: The Impact of a Trump Re-election on Iran

This article was first published on the bne IntelliNews news wire agency and media company.

The victory of Donald J. Trump in the 2024 US presidential elections is set to have profound consequences for the Islamic Republic of Iran over the next four years, particularly in the context of the region-wide conflict that West Asia has been engulfed in since 07 October 2023. While his coming bodes ill for Tehran, it is playing with what is, in some respects, a better hand this time around, and there may even be opportunities for engagement with the mercurial Trump.

A second Trump administration will likely be more hawkish toward Iran. His foreign policy and national security team will be staffed with Iran hawks, such as Brian Hook, who has been tapped to lead the transition of power at the State Department, or “prioritisers” such as Vice President-elect JD Vance, who, at best, can be said to not have Iran as one of their main areas of focus but are nonetheless pro-Israel hold hostile views toward the Axis of Resistance.

Iran was a relatively unifying foreign policy issue for the first term Trump administration, with the US government seeking “behaviour change” through the maximum pressure campaign against the Islamic Republic on a range of files such its nuclear programme and the Resistance, although some within the administration arguably pursued the more expansive goal of “regime change”.

There is likely to be a considerable element of continuity between the first and second terms of the Trump administration in personnel and approach, with the US government converging on a broad strategy of perpetual containment and regime weakening, drawing some inspiration from Peter Schweizer’s notion of the Reagan administration’s “Victory” strategy that supposedly accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union (Professor Simon Miles and I have argued elsewhere that Schweizer’s account does not reflect our latest understanding of the history of US-Soviet relations and is misapplied to the case of US-Iran relations by his acolytes). Such a US strategy toward Iran is compatible with behaviour change; failing that regime weakening, and in the view of its adherents, could put the Islamic Republic on the road to regime collapse.

A second term Trump administration is likely to rely on similar instruments as his first term: Reactive one-off military operations that are materially damaging and symbolically significant, like the US assassination of Islamic Revolution Guards Corps Jerusalem Force (IRGC-JF) command Major General Qassem Soleimani, but would refrain from entering a protracted military conflict; economic sanctions, including strong enforcement and further expansion of existing measures, as well new and potentially more damaging actions; and empowering local allies like Israel and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states to counterbalance Iran.

Of course, some figures in Iran have noted the unpredictable character of President-elect Trump, who fancies himself a dealmaker. The Iranian government may believe that it can reach an agreement on the nuclear issue and sanctions relief by appealing to him directly, thereby bypassing the institutional wall that Iran hawks in the American government are likely to put up against any US-Iran positive engagement or progress in bilateral relations.

Here, too, the Islamic Republic may also find itself on the back foot. The Iranian government is alleged to be involved in threats to assassinate Trump and to have hacked his presidential campaign in an effort to undermine it. Trump may, therefore, not be well disposed to engage with Tehran.

Nor has the senior Iranian leadership shown itself to be constitutionally capable of the kind of personal diplomacy toward the United States and American presidents that other world leaders have resorted to, let alone with the person who ordered the death of Soleimani, and the government that only recently killed Hassan Nasrallah and Ismail Haniyeh.

To put it another way: It’s hard to imagine Iranian Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or President Masoud Pezeshkian flying down to Trump Tower in New York City or Mar-o-Lago in Palm Beach, warmly congratulating Trump on his victory, and promising to put up a Trump Hotel in Tehran once the ink on a bilateral deal is dry.  

A second term of the Trump administration will also initially give Israel greater freedom of action to confront the so-called Axis of Resistance, and Iran in particular, as Vance and others associated with the incoming team have indicated. The lame-duck period will be an especially fraught time: The Times of Israel reported that Trump has told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the Gaza war by the time he enters office in January 2025, and the president-elect may want to see a similar decrease in the level of conflict in the Lebanon war and Iran tit-for-tat attacks, creating a promising air of peace and lower oil prices to coincide with the start of his term. 

We should thus expect to see an upswing in the level of violence between now and then, mainly if Iran proceeds with a much-telegraphed attack against Israel from Iraqi territory, the revenge operation for a series of Israeli airstrikes on the morning of 26 October 2024 that is believed to have severely degraded Iran’s most advanced air defence systems, critical bottlenecks in its advanced ballistic missile production capacity, and led to the death of four Iranian Army personnel. 

While we can reasonably expect Israel to decrease the intensity of its attacks as we approach the inauguration, afterwards it could very well face fewer restrictions to confront Iran than it has under the Biden administration and can prosecute the campaign according to its own preferred tempo.

The GCC states have shown themselves to be far less eager to confront Iran than Israel. After all, they lack Israel’s formidable defensive and offensive military capabilities, and are much more vulnerable to Tehran’s missile and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV or drone) arsenal by virtue of their proximity to Iran. 

Following Iran’s rapprochement with Saudi Arabia in 2023 and the subsequent improving ties with some other GCC states, they have become critical diplomatic partners in the region-wide conflict, with the Gulf states mediating and communicating messages between the warring parties. This rapprochement has also shielded the GCC states from the wrath of Tehran and the Resistance in this conflict, at least at its current stage.

Rather than become US subcontractors in the region to counterbalance Iran, GCC states – above all, Saudi Arabia – may end up using their close ties with Trump and his coterie to act as a moderating force in the hostilities between the two sides.

Iran will enter the second term of the Trump administration with arguably a better hand than last time. In May 2018, when the United States under Trump announced its exit from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA or Iran nuclear deal) and the start of its “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran, Iranian nuclear capabilities were at their lowest point in years thanks to the implementation of the deal a couple of years earlier. 

Today, these capabilities are at their most advanced, with one US think tank estimating that the Islamic Republic could test a nuclear explosive device underground or deploy a crude nuclear weapon in as little as six months following the decision to do so. Not only is it more capable of building a weapon today, but its leadership has signalled during the ongoing conflict with Israel that it may consider a shift in doctrine to do so under the right circumstances.

Iran has also shored up its domestic security position. The Iranian government violently suppressed the Women, Life, Freedom movement that raged across Iran in late 2022 with its radical demands for change. The young people who spearheaded the movement were left to pick up the pieces, but they were only bowed, not broken. 

Meanwhile, the election of the nominally reformist Masood Pezeshkian as president this year, despite the unprecedented low voter turnout in the first round of voting, has restored a veneer of authority to the system in Iran. However, it is unclear how long this will last before his government has a falling out with Ayatollah Khamenei, or the principlists who control the other elected and unelected power centres, or what could spark the next round of major protests.

Iran’s economy remains in dire straits, but has stabilised somewhat since the early days of the maximum pressure campaign in 2018 and the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, with its economy also becoming more sanctions-proof. It is unclear if a new maximum pressure campaign along similar lines to the original will be able to recreate the economic shock of the 2018 to 2020 period, when Iran sold oil to a broader base of customers vulnerable to sanctions pressure, and saw the collapse of oil demand and prices at the peak of the pandemic.

More vigorous enforcement or expansion of the existing US sanctions will likely only increase economic pressure on Iran at the margins. A substantial increase of this pressure is likely to come from efforts to cut off Tehran’s financial jugular – Iranian oil exports to China – at its source, along its transportation route, or at its destination. 

This would require the US government to cooperate with or coerce the Chinese government and private sector, or undertake more extreme measures that would take the campaign beyond lawfare, both of which are probably easier said than done. 

Excessively strong US sanctions or tariffs against China, which Trump and some of his advisors have signalled they could do, may even have a countervailing effect, opening a greater space for economic cooperation between Beijing and Tehran. 

Trump’s election amidst a region wide war in West Asia marks the beginning of a dangerous new period for Iran. But Tehran still has a few cards up its sleeve and under pressure, may feel compelled to play them, taking radical steps on sensitive files in one direction or the other. 

This could permit it to play on the American president’s risk perception and limit the scale and scope of the damage done to it. Given Trump’s past statements and proclivities, it would even be unsurprising if he had a falling out with Netanyahu and ended up limiting Israel’s freedom of action more than we expect.

Such developments, combined with incredibly deft Iranian diplomacy led by former foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and current Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi, could open space for unexpected engagement and even results, but such possibilities appear remote today.