Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's announcement that it might be withdrawing from parts of the 2015 nuclear deal is an admission by Tehran that the Trump administration's sanctions policy is striking a harsh blow to the Islamic republic. But the Iranians aren't letting it all go down the drain. We can assume that Tehran took this approach after failing to bust the oil embargo and other measures that are part of the "maximum pressure" strategy the U.S. is employing against it and North Korea.
A year after U.S. President Donald Trump's speech in which he announced he was withdrawing from the deal, the impression is that the semi-open cooperation between Israel and the moderate Sunni Arab states against Iran, with full backing from Washington, has at the very least managed to check the Iranian regime's attempts to spread its regional influence.
Saudi Arabia is leading the coalition that is battling the pro-Iranian Houthi rebels in Yemen; Israel is acting doggedly against Iran's efforts to gain a foothold in Syria; and the U.S. is providing full superpower backing as well as taking direct action against Iran through major sanctions.
The Iranian move – which was announced on the first anniversary of America's withdrawal from the deal – demonstrates the change in Tehran's policy. Are the winds of war starting to blow? Trump said Thursday: "They should call," and senior administration officials stressed his desire to return to negotiations, but some op-eds and analyses about the deployment of more U.S. forces to the Persian Gulf warned that Trump's policy on Iran was becoming "dangerous," as the journal Foreign Policy wrote. Is it? We should remember that similar things were written at the height of the tension between the U.S. and North Korea a year and a half ago. Since then, Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have met twice, even though actual negotiations are moving ahead by microns.
Tehran knows that Washington doesn't want a war. Even Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif admitted that, although he claimed that others – such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – want to cause one. The ayatollah regime knows that Trump wields force, but more than anything wants a legacy that includes historic peace deals based on American interests – with Pyongyang, between Israel and the Palestinians and with Tehran. The question is whether the Iranians are willing to pay the price.
