Iran’s Next Move

Iran’s Next Move

A senior Iranian official Thursday warned that Tehran would not tolerate the inspection of vessels belonging to the Islamic republic in open seas under the pretext of implementing the latest round of sanctions imposed on Iran by the U.N. Security Council (UNSC). Kazem Jalali, rapporteur of Parliament’s Foreign Policy and National Security Committee, said one such response would be Iranian countermeasures in the strategic Straits of Hormuz. This statement from the lawmaker is the latest in a series of similar statements from senior Iranian civil and military officials in recent days.

Iran making good on this threat hinges on a number of prerequisites. First, a country must actually move to exercise the option of boarding an Iranian ship. If that were to happen, the question then would be: Will Iran actually go as far as retaliating in the Straits of Hormuz? After all, such an action carries the huge risk of a counter-reaction from the United States, which cannot allow Iran to tamper with the free flow of oil through the straits.

At this point, it is unclear how Tehran will respond to one of its ships being searched. What is certain is that this latest round of sanctions has created a crisis for the Iranian leadership both on the foreign policy front and domestically, where an intra-elite struggle has been publicly playing out for a year. One may recall that prior to the June 9 approval of the sanctions was that the United States was not in a position to impose sanctions with enough teeth to force Iran to change its behavior.

That view still stands because the latest round of sanctions are not strong enough to trigger a capitulation on the part of the Iranians. But they have enough bite to prevent Iran from doing business as usual, especially with the European Union and the United States piling on additional unilateral sanctions. Perhaps the most significant development is the Russian alignment with the United States, which made the fourth round of sanctions possible.

Despite saying earlier this week that his country is ready to negotiate, there is no way Ahmadinejad can come to the negotiating table just as the United States has gained an upper hand in the bargaining process. He cannot be seen as caving in to the pressure of the American-led UNSC sanctions. As it is, the Iranian president has to deal with the domestic uproar that he is leading the Islamic republic to ruin, which makes efforts to regain his position among the warring factions and formulate a response to get the Islamic republic back in the driver’s seat even more difficult.Russia is no longer protecting Iran in the UNSC. Furthermore, imposing sanctions on Iran after it signed a uranium swap deal has been a major loss for Tehran. It has created a very embarrassing situation for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at home, where he has no shortage of opponents — even among his own ultraconservative camp. The U.S. move to allow the May 17 Turkish-Brazilian-Iranian uranium swap agreement to go through, followed quickly by a move toward sanctions suggests that Washington tried to exploit the intra-elite rift to its advantage and undermine the position of relative strength that Tehran had been enjoying up to that point. The U.S. move has not only exacerbated tensions between the warring factions in the Iranian political establishment, it has also forced Iranian foreign policy decision-makers to go back to the drawing board and re-evaluate Iran’s strategy vis-a-vis the United States.

While it has a number of cards to play, (e.g., Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan), precisely how Iran will respond remains as opaque as the infighting within the regime. But the next move has to come from Iran. This new situation has led international observers to engage in their own process of reassessing the situation on the Iranian domestic and foreign policy fronts.

Posted via web from Jay’s Blogs

This entry was posted on 18. June 2010 at 18:37 and is filed under Iran, Islam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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