2019: Looking back: Iran9. Iran’s Growing Middle East Sway

The year which ends today saw growing tensions between Iran and the United States. The United States withdrew from the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, but the administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign, while causing some economic difficulties inside Iran, has failed to dissuade Iran from pursuing its two related strategic goals: Achieve regional hegemony in the Middle East, and shorten the nuclear weapons break-out time, that is, the time it would take Iran to build a functioning nuclear weapon once a decision to do so has been made.

On both fronts, Iran has made considerable progress.

President Trump’s impulsive decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria has substantially improved the strategic position in the region of both Russia and Iran. The U.S. withdrawal allows Iran to establish a land corridor from Iran to the Mediterranean, and move advanced military assets closer to Israel.

And Iran has been violating one clause of the 2015 nuclear agreement after another – but doing so slowly and incrementally, which each transgression deemed by the Western powers to be too small to justify snapping back to draconian sanctions under which Iran suffered until 2015.

When the Obama administration finalized the negotiations for the 2015 agreement, Iran’s break-out time was estimated to be 2-3 months. The agreement pushed Iran back, to a break-out time of about 15 months. Now, experts say Iran’s break-out time is about six months – with each passing month reducing the time Iran would need to rush for the bomb.

Iran’s achievement of its twin ambitions – a regional hegemony to rival that of Israel’s, and the ability to build nuclear weapons on a short notice – have been aided by a puzzling weak and confused U.S. responses to Iran’s transgressions (although the United States, on Sunday, did bomb six bases of an Iranian-funded Iraqi Shi’a militia).

In March, Iran began to enrich uranium to levels beyond that allowed by the 2015; it has restarted its program of building advanced centrifuges to enrich uranium; it has re-opened the underground centrifuge farm in Fordow; and it is working to re-open the nuclear plant at Arak, which will allow it to produce weapon-grade plutonium; and it has restricted the ability of IAEA monitors to engage in examination of suspicious sites; and it has accelerated its ballistic missile test program.

At the same time, Iran began harassing and seizing commercial vessels in important shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf. Iran shot down a U.S. military drone in June, nearly leading to a retaliatory U.S. airstrike, which President Trump aborted in the last minute. As one expert notes, the apparent lack of U.S. response—though there is evidence of an unacknowledged cyber strike—seemed to embolden Tehran, which launched a sophisticated attack on a key Saudi oil facility in September.

The September attack is a major source of worry for the United States and Israel. Iran used armed drones and cruise missiles – which it had developed – to attack and partially paralyze about half of Saudi oil refining facilities. These facilities are surrounded by the most sophisticated defensive systems developed by the United States and Israel (Israel is selling advanced military technology to Saudi Arabia under an arrangement which calls for removing the “Made in Israel” tags from the equipment). What worries American and Israeli military planners is not only the fact that the Iranian drones and missiles were able to penetrate the thick defensive layers around the Saudi oil facilities, but that the Iranian vehicles were able to reach their target without even being spotted by the various radars and sensors deployed around important Saudi sites.

In Israel, the operation of the Dimona nuclear reactor was shut down for a while as Israeli experts assessed the risk of Iran using similar tactics to attack the nuclear plant.