Trump can help Israel against Iran in final months – analysis

Interestingly, Iran was not mentioned as a topic of discussion in Israel, despite being mentioned repeatedly in the context of Pompeo’s visits to the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia on this tour.

Yet it defies all logic to think Iran is not going to be on the agenda for Pompeo’s visit to Jerusalem. Yes, there is much to discuss about the Abraham Accords, but Israel is one of the primary targets of the Iranian nuclear threat.

And in the two months apparently remaining for the Trump administration, it is more likely to be able to take effective steps directly countering the Iranian threat than on expanding the circle of Middle Eastern countries establishing relations with Israel.

When it comes to the Abraham Accords, the State Department official said UAE and Bahrain are working towards opening embassies in Israel and starting cooperation in education, health care, security and more.

“The accords represent a historic breakthrough, and we believe more Arab and Muslim-majority countries will soon follow down this path of peace,” he said.

In Israel, however, officials are more circumspect about the chances of convincing more Arab states to normalize ties.

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Intelligence Minister and Security Cabinet member Eli Cohen pointed out that many processes in the region were put on hold ahead of this month’s US election, and that situation will likely continue until presumed president-elect Joe Biden makes his positions clear.

“I think many countries in the region will now sit and wait and see what the American policy will look like,” Cohen said.

Saudi Arabia is one country that has been mentioned as a likely candidate to establish relations with Israel soon. Biden, however, has made statements about distancing his administration from Riyadh, especially in light of its human rights violations, which the Trump administration ignored. The Saudis would be likely to wait and see what they can get out of a Biden administration in exchange for normalization with Israel, whether it’s weapons sales or more favorable policies or both.

The minister expressed hope that Biden would pick up where Trump left off: “We’re in a process of peace agreements, of promoting stability in the region. If I were Biden, I would strengthen this axis and not make things easier for Iran.”

In the meantime, Israel is encouraging the Trump administration to take direct action to reduce threats from Iran.

It’s likely that the US and Israel have something up their sleeves that can’t be mentioned. The recent revelation that, according to The New York Times, Israel killed the number two official in Al Qaeda, who was based in Iran, in August, is a reminder that there are always things happening behind the scenes when it comes to Israeli and American efforts to curb the Iranian threat.

Some have floated the possibility of an attack on Iran in the next two months, but this seems unlikely in light of Trump’s choice of acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller’s letter sent to all Department of Defense employees on Friday, calling to end the state of war the US has been in since 2001.

“This is a critical phase in which we transition our efforts from a leadership to a supporting role…All wars must end. Ending wars and requires compromise and partnership. We met the challenge; we gave it our all. Now, it’s time to come home,” Miller wrote.

The US can, for example, send bunker-buster bombs to Israel, like a bill proposed by Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Brian Mast (R-Fla.) last month would allow. The 30,000 pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb that the bill mentions would allow Israel to defend itself against Iran if it develops nuclear weapons and would “shore up Israel’s qualitative military edge,” as Gottheimer said.

One expert, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Israel would need B-1 or B-52 bombers to carry the bunker buster to Iran without its air force being able to stop it.

The Obama administration refused to give Israel the bunker busters or for the IAF train on the planes.

The Trump administration is in favor of giving Israel bunker busters, but has said the US only has 18 B-1 bombers. Still, the US has plenty of Cold War era B-52s that can do the job.

When Pompeo visits Israel this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could push for the US to give Israel to these capabilities that will shift the balance in the region so that Israel can destroy Iran’s nuclear program if need be.

As for what’s being discussed more openly, the Trump administration clearly is not relaxing its “maximum pressure” campaign in its final months. The US plans to pile on more and more sanctions in the coming weeks, with a goal to make it difficult for Biden to return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 nuclear deal that gave Iran a long-term path to a bomb.

Some of these sanctions would be placed by designating entities and individuals as terrorists, others would be on human rights violators and others would target Iran’s ballistic missile system.

These kinds of sanctions are technically easy to undo; whatever US President Donald Trump can do with a flourish of executive power can be reversed by Biden in the exact same way. But the Trump administration is relying on the idea that lifting sanctions on terrorists and human rights violators would be politically toxic. It would raise the question of why the Biden administration cares so much about restoring the Obama-era agreement that it would overlook atrocities, thus making it much more challenging for Biden to take the necessary steps to rejoin the Iran deal.

Former Ambassador to the US Michael Oren, who was in Washington as the Obama administration began talks with Iran, said the Trump administration was giving Biden “the gift of leverage” going into negotiations, and called on the president-elect not to squander it.

“As Bibi used to say, we have them on the ropes, don’t let them get off the mat,” Oren said.

However, Oren efforts that Biden associates have been making to counter the Trump administration’s efforts, by spreading “myths” about the efforts to curb an Iran nuclear weapon.

“The ur-lie of the JCPOA…[is a] false dichotomy that it’s the either Iran Deal or war,” Oren said. “That isn’t the choice. The choice is between the Iran Deal and a better deal. Nobody in the Middle East believed the choice is war. The only people who believed that is the American people because they’re so war-weary, and it worked.

“I think that Biden would [present that dichotomy] again and that’s a lie,” he said.

A “multidimensional lie” that some in the Biden orbit have been spreading is that Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than it was before Trump pulled the US out of the JCPOA, Oren said.

“One, the IAEA says Iran has not enriched enough uranium to produce even one nuclear weapon. Two, the JCPOA enables Iran to develop centrifuges that enrich uranium at four times the present rate, reducing the breakout time to a quarter of what it was, which means much closer than Iran was to a bomb in 2015,” he explained.

Taking that into account, strategies that the Israel and the Trump administration are not discussing openly are likely to have more staying power and be far more effective in protecting Israel from the Iranian threat at this juncture.