[ad_1]
The assassination of a top Iranian nuclear scientist will further hamper US President-elect Joe Biden’s ability to restart diplomacy between Washington and Tehran, US analysts said Friday, just hours after Mohsen Fakhrizadeh’s death.
Biden, who will take office on January 20, has said he wants to return to a 2015 international agreement that curbed the Iranian nuclear program, a move that would signal a rollback from President Donald Trump’s hardline “maximum pressure” campaign. against Iran.
While it was unclear who was responsible for Fakhrizadeh’s assassination outside of Tehran, Iranian officials pointed the finger at Israel, a key US ally that has advocated for Trump’s hardline stance against the Iranian government.
“You can imagine how open the United States would be to negotiations if … before they could begin, the Iranians did something like this against Israel or against the United States itself,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, a thought -Tank in Washington, DC.
This photo, published by the semi-official Fars news agency, shows the scene in which Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed in Absard, a small town east of Tehran. [Fars News Agency via AP]
Parsi said the assassination of Fakhrizadeh, a senior nuclear physicist and head of the Research and Innovation Organization in Iran’s Defense Ministry, created a “win-win” situation for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
If the Iranian government responds, Netanyahu may drag Washington into a military confrontation with Tehran, Parsi said, while if Iran shows restraint, the Israeli leader has created an atmosphere that hinders US diplomacy with Iran.
Israel, which for years has been accused of carrying out a series of targeted killings of Iranian nuclear scientists, declined to immediately comment on Fakhrizadeh’s murder.
“From Netanyahu’s perspective, this is a time for him to undermine Biden. In a way, Biden is the real target here, ”Parsi told Al Jazeera.
Renewed nuclear deal
The Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 as part of its effort to isolate Tehran, and has imposed economic sanctions against key Iranian industries and officials.
Political analysts and observers have expressed concern that Trump will take further action in the final weeks of his administration to further destabilize Iran and its allies in the Middle East, and will put the incoming Biden administration in a difficult position when he takes office. position.
Biden’s nominee for US secretary of state Tony Blinken told world security leaders at a conference in August that he hoped the United States could build a renewed nuclear deal with Iran that would be “stronger and longer.”
President-elect Biden said this week that he intends to nominate Tony Blinken as his secretary of state. In August, Blinken said the Biden administration wants to build a renewed nuclear deal with Iran. [File: Carolyn Kaster/AP]
Parsi said that Biden, who was vice president of the United States when President Barack Obama signed the nuclear deal with Iran and other world powers in 2015, “would have to initiate diplomacy fairly quickly, lift sanctions and return to the nuclear deal” to amend. To united states. Relationship with Iran.
He added that US and Iranian officials hope to discuss other issues, such as ballistic missiles and regional politics, but Friday’s assassination has made the prospect even more difficult.
“The likelihood that Iranians can be open to compromise and compromise … is clearly damaged,” Parsi said.
‘Fuel’ moment
Neither Trump nor Biden commented directly on Fakhrizadeh’s assassination on Friday, although the Republican president retweeted Israeli writer Yossi Melman, who said the scientist’s death “is a major psychological and professional blow to Iran.”
However, current and former senior US officials have publicly expressed concern, including former CIA Director John Brennan, who called the attack “a criminal and very reckless act.”
“Iranian leaders would do well to await the return of responsible American leadership on the global stage and resist the urge to answer against the perceived culprits,” Brennan tweeted.
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said he had not been briefed on Fakhrizadeh’s assassination, but that “whenever the United States or an ally assassinates a foreign leader outside of a declaration of war, we normalize the tactic as a tool of government “.
If the main purpose of Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s assassination was to make it difficult to restart the Iran nuclear deal, then this assassination does not make the United States, Israel, or the world safer.
– Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) November 27, 2020
Aaron David Miller, principal investigator for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the murder comes at a “flammable” time.
In mid-November, Trump asked top advisers for options to attack Iran’s nuclear research facility in Natanz before leaving office, according to US media reports. An Iranian government spokesman warned of a “crushing response” if Iran were attacked.
The United States Air Force then flew a long-range B-52 bomber from its base in North Dakota to the Middle East “to deter aggression and reassure American partners and allies,” the United States Central Command said. November 21.
“Between now and the start of the Biden administration, because of Iranian concerns about provoking a unilateral attack by Trump against Natanz, they really are limited in terms of retaliation,” Miller told Al Jazeera.
“The Israelis can calculate that now is a good time to do things like this,” Miller said.
“You could see a number of factors coming together that could make the next few months quite combustible.”
More provocations?
While Fakhrizadeh’s assassination was shocking to some, Nader Hashemi, director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Denver’s School of International Studies, said that in the context of recent US-Iran relations, ” conforms to a pre-existing pattern ”.
“The pattern is the Trump administration’s attempt to bring Iran to its knees, possibly overthrow the regime, paralyze it through maximum sanctions,” Hashemi told Al Jazeera.
He compared Fakhrizadeh’s assassination to the U.S. assassination of senior Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a drone strike ordered by Trump on January 3 near the Baghdad international airport.
“We almost had a war between the United States and Iran at the time,” Hashemi said, adding that with Trump just weeks away from the end of his presidency, more action is likely to be taken “in hopes of provoking Iran into a reprisal”.
That will make future negotiations between the United States and Iran much more difficult, he said, “and that is precisely the point.”
[ad_2]
