Even as his “armada” heads towards Iran, US president Donald Trump’s plans for strikes against the regime and his rationale for attacks are apparently undergoing a re-evaluation. The Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, various support ships capable of firing Tomahawk missiles, fighter jets, refuelling capabilities and missile defences have all flowed into the region where Trump says he is prepared to strike with “speed and violence.”
Compounding deliberate ambiguity and uncertainty, central features of the US president’s strategy, questions are being raised about the purpose of any attacks. The US has referenced the promised defence of anti-regime demonstrators, thousands of whom have died, a second attempt to kill off the country’s battered nuclear enrichment programme and threats necessary to bring the ayatollahs to the negotiating table. Or is the US seeking regime change?
Speculation about targets range from nuclear sites, to strikes against the powerful Revolutionary Guards, industrial infrastructure, or against Iranian leaders themselves.
What Trump has not done is even attempt to seek legal authority from the UN for what are likely to be gross violations of international law. The UN remains the organisation which, however inadequate, represents the only legal framework for global collective security, but for which Trump has complete contempt. And there are serious questions about what domestic legal authority the US would use to strike at Iran in the absence of congressional authorisation.
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On Saturday, Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s top security body, wrote on social media that, contrary to social media speculation, arrangements for negotiations with the US were progressing. Trump spoke to Fox News about “serious discussions” underway.
Iran has responded to US pressure by cancelling some 800 executions of convicted protesters but the scope of US “democracy” demands remains very unclear. Its security demands go much further, and include limits on the range and number of ballistic missiles in Iran’s arsenal, and an end to all support for regional proxy groups, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen.
Trump appears to be taking a similar approach to Iran as he did to Venezuela, where the US amassed forces just off its coast for months as part of a pressure campaign to oust Nicolás Maduro. Any follow-up in Iran, however, is likely to be more complicated and unpredictable, not least the search for a replacement government. Fears of Iranian retaliation and a broader regional conflagration have led the US’s regional Arab allies, and even a broadly-supportive Israel, to urge Trump not to strike now. The president, however, pays little attention to international opinion.
