The president was upset. Watching TV in his White House residence, his usual morning routine, Donald Trump saw his intelligence chiefs kick the legs out from under yet another of his pet campaigns: Iran. Trump and two of his top national security officials had been suggesting for two years that the Islamic republic was still in pursuit of a nuclear weapon and posed a mortal threat to its neighbors and the West.
But now, Dan Coats, his national intelligence director, was in a Capitol Hill hearing room saying that wasn’t true: Iran was living up to the letter of the deal the U.S. under President Barack Obama and five other nations had negotiated with the Middle Eastern country to dismantle its nuclear program, Coats said. Not only that, added CIA Director Gina Haspel, but Iran could well decide to restart the program if the sanctions that Trump had just reimposed—breaking America’s end of the bargain—weren’t lifted.
Trump took to Twitter. Coats and Haspel were “wrong,” he posted on January 30. “Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!” But he wasn’t through with Iran. In extraordinary remarks with CBS and The New York Times over the next few days, Trump called Tehran “the number one terrorist nation in the world.” He blamed the Islamic republic for “every single” problem he had inherited in the Middle East, a remarkable—and wholly unsupportable—assertion. He called his intelligence chiefs “extremely passive and naïve when it comes to the dangers of Iran.”
Trump then hinted at escalating covert activities against Iran or even a military confrontation. “I could tell you stories,” he told the Times, “of things that we were going to do to them as recently as a week ago.”
To many observers with long memories, Trump’s comments were an eerie replay of a pivotal moment 17 years earlier, when another Republican president, George W. Bush, labeled Iraq part of an “axis of evil” that was on the threshold of building a weapon that would end in an Iraqi “mushroom cloud” over America. The following year, in 2003, Bush dispatched nearly 200,000 U.S. troops into Iraq in search of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that turned out not to exist. Neither did Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s alleged connection with Al-Qaeda. What followed was a calamitous decade-long occupation that the U.S. and the entire Middle East are still struggling with.
Veteran Middle East hands worry Trump is steering America into yet another misguided regional disaster, this time with Iran. A longtime former top CIA operations officer compared Trump’s misrepresentations about Iran to the lies a succession of presidents told to justify the war in Vietnam. “I don’t want to overblow the Vietnam analogies, but we’re in the process, from what I can see, of lying to ourselves and the American people about Iran,” he tells Newsweek, speaking on terms of anonymity because he retains close ties to the agency. “It’s not gonna attack us tomorrow. It’s not gonna kill us tomorrow. It’s not interested in direct confrontation with the U.S., despite the war of words.”
“The more you push, the more they resist,” says Chas Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “And the more you overtly push and blunder, the more they can attribute every problem they have to you. So there’s a sort of unholy partnership” between the Trump administration and Tehran’s own hawks. The problem, he and other experts worry, is that Trump’s blunders and Iranian overreactions could lead to a shooting war nobody wants.
Destination Unknown
Trump’s remarks, meanwhile, had former senior national security officials scratching their heads. Some told Newsweek that they’re skeptical of Trump’s hints that dramatic actions against Iran were considered. But close observers say the broad outlines of Trump’s approach have been evident since he took office, when he renounced the nuclear deal. He seemed to be itching to open a new and dangerous chapter in a 40-year-long war of threats and dirty tricks, this one backed by U.S., and particularly pro-Israel, hawks. Freeman calls it “gesture foreign policy.”
“You’re showing your outrage, and you’re making life difficult for the other party,” he tells Newsweek. “It’s not very purposive.”
Trump’s weapons include sanctions, support for anti-Iran exile groups and a free hand for Israel to attack Iranian outposts in Syria. The rest of his aggressive campaign amounts to a shadow war with Iran, covert actions that include social media manipulation of the kind Moscow wielded against the U.S. during the 2016 election.
Officials are happy to talk in general about their campaign to “make sure that Iran is not a destabilizing influence,” as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo puts it, but otherwise decline to share details.
Such actions have been cheered by longtime Iran hawks, including three of Trump’s most favored advisers: Pompeo, White House national security adviser John Bolton and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, both close confidants of Kushner, have long lobbied for more aggressive U.S. policies toward Tehran, including direct military attacks on its nuclear, military and intelligence facilities.
The problem, say a wide variety of experts, is that for every escalation the Trump administration and its predecessors have levied on Iran, the regime has responded with its own threats—and violence. And no one, on either side, seems to know where the increasing tempo of attacks and counterattacks is headed.
Trump tossed another barb and surprised regional allies when, in early February, he announced plans to keep troops in Iraq to monitor Iran. “We’re going to keep watching,” he told CBS, “and we’re going to keep seeing, and if there’s trouble, if somebody is looking to do nuclear weapons or other things, we’re going to know it before they do.” Iraqi President Barham Salih quickly slapped that down. “Don’t overburden Iraq with your own issues,” he told Trump through the news media. The U.S. is also pressuring electricity-starved Iraq to stop purchasing energy from Iran as part of new sanctions, further fraying relations with Baghdad.
All this just added confusion about what the Trump administration was planning—with potentially dangerous repercussions. “The U.S. has no idea what it wants, and Iran has no way to read Washington with all the mixed messages coming from the Trump administration,” says Ali Alfoneh, an Iran analyst who is a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, funded by Iran’s arch-enemy Saudi Arabia.
Iran has engendered fear and fascination ever since Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile and led a broadly popular Islamic revolution in 1979. The overthrow effectively reversed a CIA-organized coup a quarter-century earlier that had toppled the socialist government of Mohammed Mossadegh on behalf of Anglo-American oil interests. Relations between Washington and Tehran further hardened when Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy and took more than 50 Americans hostage in a crisis that dominated television news coverage for 444 days. From then on, Iran was branded a rogue nation.
President Ronald Reagan designated the regime “a state sponsor of terrorism” and in 1981 threw his weight behind Iraq’s invasion of Iran in a war that lasted nearly a decade and devastated the country. After Khomeini died in 1989, his successor, Ayatollah Ali .Khamenei, expanded Iran’s regional influence, first by backing the Shiite Lebanese resistance to Israel’s 1982 invasion, which led to the creation of the powerful Hezbollah militia that carried out terrorist attacks on U.S. targets. Then came the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which led to Iranian proxies assuming power in Baghdad. In 2011, when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad faced a popular revolt, Iran and Hezbollah provided critical support. On February 11, to mark the 40th anniversary of the revolution, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani gave a speech to tout the country’s military might. “We have not—and will not—ask for permission from anybody for improving our defensive power,” he said.
Trump’s vows to contain Iran, which he views as more of a threat to regional and global security than ISIS, feel like a throwback to 1978. But Iran, too, seems to be “trying to turn the clock back to the bad old days of the 1980s and early 1990s,” dispatching hit teams abroad to assassinate exile opposition figures, as Alfoneh wrote last fall for FDD’s Long War Journal, a website run by the pro-Israel Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
The Long Arm of Tehran
After opening for business in 1980, Iran’s spy agencies wasted no time liquidating the country’s enemies at home and abroad. One of the early foreign operations of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, was the killing of an exile opposition leader just outside Washington, D.C. Taking a page from a famous scene in the 1975 spy thriller Three Days of the Condor, the assassin, an American recruit to the revolution who had taken the name Dawud Salahuddin, disguised himself as a letter carrier, rang the target’s doorbell and fatally shot him when he answered.
Tehran continued to pursue its enemies abroad in those early years, ruthlessly mowing down exile officials plotting to overthrow the regime. But after years of relative quietude, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security has again stepped up attacks overseas. In 2015 and again in 2017, it was suspected of liquidating dissidents in the Netherlands.