As Trump Squares Off With Iran, the Middle East Is on Edge

The Trump administration’s high-pressure campaign to deal with Iran’s nuclear program has put U.S. allies in the Middle East on edge that failure at the negotiating table could spark another war.

President Trump has said he prefers a diplomatic solution to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, but he has threatened that Iran is “going to be in great danger” if talks don’t go well.

The risk is if talks hit a logjam at a time when the U.S. has piled up military assets in the region and Iran remains vulnerable after Israel battered its air defenses and allies last year, the U.S. or Israel could decide to strike, potentially prompting retaliatory attacks across the Gulf.

In a letter sent to Iran’s supreme leader in March, Trump set a two-month time frame for negotiations to succeed, though it’s unclear if the period was to begin then or once talks get under way.

“If he gives a deadline or a timeline for negotiations, does this military buildup, and then after all those things doesn’t get to any sort of meaningful agreement on Iran’s nuclear program and doesn’t use military force, it will forever do damage that the superpower bluffed,” said Dana Stroul, research director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East.

Trump’s special envoy for Middle East and Russia issues, Steve Witkoff, is expected to talk with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Oman on Saturday.

Washington’s energy-exporting Arab partners—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain—sit across the narrow Gulf waters from Iran. They have vulnerable economic and civilian infrastructure and host U.S. military bases that could be targeted by Iran or its allied militias.

“The regime might well calculate that the entire region—Israel, U.S., and Arab targets alike—are all fair game in response to large-scale operations intending to roll back its core nuclear program,” former senior U.S. defense and national security officials from the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, a Washington think tank, wrote in a report this week.

The U.S.’s Gulf allies, meanwhile, are still smarting from being left out by the Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran and European powers that produced a deal to freeze Tehran’s nuclear program in 2015, an official with the U.A.E. said this week.

While the agreement placed temporary limits on Iran’s ability to make progress toward a bomb, it freed up funds that critics say were used to fund destabilizing militias around the region while not addressing Iran’s ballistic missile development, which neighbors see as a much bigger threat to their security. Those concerns need to be addressed, the official said.

Israel, which has courted the Arab monarchies of the Gulf to form a bloc against Iran, is concerned the U.S. could settle for less than fully dismantling Iran’s nuclear program. Israel would prefer any strike happen sooner rather than later, while Iran’s defenses are weakened and before it gets even closer to building a bomb.

Iran’s nuclear advances in the past decade could make reaching a new deal more difficult. Many current and former U.S. officials assess that the potential for an American military strike on the country’s nuclear facilities is higher than it has been in years.

Israeli airstrikes last October shredded the country’s strategic air defenses and damaged missile production facilities, exposing it to future attacks, U.S. and Israeli officials have said. Israel’s war in Lebanon last year also severely weakened Hezbollah, leaving it in no position to mount a large attack on Israel in response to a strike on Iran. Yemen’s Houthi militants, which Iran also supports, are under pressure due to Trump’s stepped up air campaign against them.

The Pentagon began rapidly expanding its forces in the Middle East in recent weeks, adding a second carrier strike group, B-2 bombers and F-35 combat jets while beefing up Patriot antimissile batteries to defend U.S. bases and host nations.

U.S. officials say the buildup is aimed at suppressing attacks by the Houthis and deterring Iran, not in preparation for an imminent attack. If the elevated posture lasts more than a couple months, it would create resource strains in other theaters, including the Asia-Pacific, requiring painful adjustments to maintain. That could create a use it or lose it mentality.

Trump said Wednesday in the Oval Office that he was giving the talks a short timeline to succeed and was open to military action if they don’t.

“They can’t have a nuclear weapon,” the president said. “You know when you start talks, you know if they’re going along well or not and I would say the conclusion would be when I think they’re not going along well.”

Israel worries the talks could produce an interim arrangement that freezes or modestly rolls back Iranian enrichment in exchange for limited sanctions relief, an updated version of the 2015 agreement.

“That is the option Israel would like the least, because it essentially kicks the can down the road and misses this window of opportunity for military action while Iranian proxies are weakened and their air defenses are degraded,” said Dan Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East in the Biden administration.

Gulf states also worry they could be targeted if Iran responds to an American or Israeli attack. Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Qalibaf warned earlier this month that Iran would retaliate against any U.S. strike by attacking American interests in the Middle East.

“If the Americans attack the sanctity of Iran, the entire region will blow up like a spark in an ammunition dump,” Qalibaf said in a speech in Tehran.

While Israel would likely be a prime target, it is more compact and heavily guarded by sophisticated air defenses than the energy installations, oil pipelines, desalination plants and U.S. bases spread across the Gulf states.

Qatar’s prime minister warned last month that a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities could risk contaminating Gulf waters, which several Arab states rely on for desalination.

Israel successfully defended itself against heavy missile and drone barrages from Iran twice last year with help from a U.S.-led coalition.

Trump has said he plans to visit two or three Gulf countries in mid-May, a trip he is unlikely to jeopardize with military action that could trigger a regional conflagration.

Shapiro, who is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, thinks the risks of a strike will rise going into the fall. Unless there is progress toward a new deal, the European parties to the Obama administration’s 2015 agreement are expected to reimpose sanctions on Iran in October, which could lead Iran to expel nuclear inspectors and pull out of the global treaty preventing development of nuclear weapons.

Though Iran and the regional militias it supports have been significantly degraded over the past year and a half, some U.S. and Gulf officials cautioned the country is down but not out.

A Gulf diplomat warned against underestimating even a weakened Iran’s ability to cause chaos in the region. The country has been wounded, but isn’t in retreat, the diplomat said.

Originally published in Wall Street Journal.