- U.S. and Israeli strikes have caused great damage to Iran’s nuclear weapons development.
- Washington laid extensive groundwork through diplomatic and economic deals with regional Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar, effectively isolating Iran.
- Despite the damage, Iran retains asymmetric tools—like the Houthis and proxies in Iraq—to disrupt oil markets.
One of the three key measures then-President Elect Donald Trump would take in his early days as President would be “giving the nod to Israel to do whatever it wants with Iran”. After all, following then-President Joe Biden’s flat ‘no’ on Israel striking Iran’s nuclear sites in retaliation for earlier Iranian missile attacks on Israel in early October, Trump stated: “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. That’s the biggest risk we have.
The biggest risk we have is nuclear … Soon they’re going to have nuclear weapons. And then you’re going to have problems.” He then added: “Israel should hit the [Iranian] nuclear [facilities] first and worry about the rest later.” With Israeli and U.S. direct attacks on Iran having left its nuclear weapons development programme in tatters, now is later: so what happens next?
Whatever else may be said about Trump by whoever may say it, in this matter, he and his administration appear not just to have dealt with the key problem in the only logical way it could have been dealt with, but also to have laid the post-operational groundwork to their advantage beforehand.
It perhaps reflects the fact that Trump has long made it clear that he does not want to get the U.S. involved in the sort of “endless wars” epitomised by its years-long forays into Afghanistan and Iraq, as analysed in full in my latest book on the new global oil market order.
Trump though laid the groundwork for these potentially chaos-inducing attacks on an Islamic Middle East state by the Jewish state of Israel with multiple visits by him and his senior staff to several of the region’s countries, including a recent whirlwind tour of Saudi Arabia – a longtime adversary of Iran, and the key Sunni Islam power against Iran’s Shia Islam leadership role – Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, among others.
In Saudi Arabia’s case, this diplomatic offensive was boosted by April’s meetings in Riyadh featuring U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright to discuss resuscitating the idea of Washington helping the Kingdom’s nuclear energy programme, as also detailed by OilPrice.com.
The month after that, the two countries signed a US$600 billion economic deal and a US$142 billion arms deal and talks also again touched on the wider benefits to Saudi Arabia of it concluding a relationship normalisation deal with Israel sooner rather than later. These deals were the foundation stone of first-presidency Trump’s attempts to rebuild the U.S.’s influence across the Middle East, as also detailed in my latest book on the new global oil market order.
It is worth noting here that the United Arab Emirates was an early signatory to such a deal with Israel – which it never withdrew from, despite reports to the contrary – while Qatar quickly became one of the U.S.’s key non-NATO allies when it shifted its focus of emergency liquefied supplies from China to the U.S. and its allies in the second half of 2022.
Tying in these influential Islamic Middle Eastern countries to those already in or close to the sphere of influence of the U.S. and its allies isolated Iran and its allies before Washington saw fit to finish the job of gutting Iran’s nuclear weapons development programme. It also means that Iran’s ability to retaliate against the U.S. bloc has been severely downgraded too.
The chance of any renewed call by Tehran for an oil blockade by Islamic OPEC members appears much less than it was when it made the first such appeal back in November 2023 – close to zero, in fact. The ability of Iran to extract vengeance through its key proxies of Hamas and Hezbollah has also been enormously downgraded through the systematic attacks on these organisations by Israeli military and intelligence forces since Hamas’s gleeful orgy of murder, rape, torture and kidnapping in Israel on 7 October 2023. It is also clear that Iran’s two big global sponsors – China and Russia – have been advised by Washington to stay out of what is happening currently in Iran and the broader Middle East.
Such words of warning have taken on a much heavier weight since the U.S. and U.K.-led removal of Russia’s former longstanding proxy leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, in December. “The U.S. wanted to put Moscow’s, Beijing’s and Tehran’s leadership on notice that Washington can easily redraw and restructure borders and regimes in not just the Middle East but also in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, if it wants to,” a senior security source in the European Union told OilPrice.com at the time.
That said, Iran still can cause trouble across the Middle East and beyond, especially through actions affecting the oil price so long as the current ultra-Islamic regime of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – guarded and spearheaded by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) – is in power. Iran’s Yemeni proxies the Houthis have shown that they can still disrupt shipping in and around the key oil export routes of the Red Sea leading to the Suez Canal route.
The IRGC and related operational groups could also severely disrupt the routes in the Strait of Hormuz area – through which flows around 35% of the work’s oil shipments – or shut it down entirely. Even more seriously from the perspective not just of oil prices but of the wider security state across the region could be Houthi attacks on key Saudi Arabian oil facilities as occurred on 14 September 2019, and are also fully analysed in my latest book on the new global oil market order.
The attacks on the Kingdom’s massive Abqaiq oil processing facility and Khurais oil field caused a long suspension of 5.7 million barrels per day (bpd) from Saudi Arabia, equating to well over half of its actual production capacity and causing the biggest jump in global prices since 1988. Iraq too is the home to multiple proxy Iranian terrorist groups, which have frequently used it as a base to attack U.S. forces still on the ground there. Again, if the current regime felt under existential threat then the ordering of widespread such attacks would appear highly likely, despite the certainty of massive U.S. military retaliation.
Up until the U.S.’s first direct aerial attack on Iran in the bombing of the Fordow nuclear enrichment facility over the weekend, Donald Trump has at various times said that the way is still open for negotiations with Iran over a new Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, or colloquially ‘the nuclear deal’).
That said, the central aim of these from Washington’s perspective was to remove Iran’s nuclear threat, so with this having largely been done there seems little meaning left in any such further talks. The only potential topic of conversation would be to thrash out a deal with the current regime aimed at preventing it from trying to rebuild a nuclear programme.
However, Iran knows that such talks would be of the ‘take it or leave it’ variety, involving little to no input from the side of its negotiators except a signature. The deal on the table would be that laid out in full exclusively in OilPrice.com, which was, is, and will always be aimed specifically at destroying the very foundation of the IRGC and of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran itself.
However, Iran’s leadership also now knows that signing it and then doing nothing to implement its key conditions – most notably the membership of the Financial Action Task Force – would not be tolerated by the U.S. or Israel. “It’s immaterial to the U.S. whether the current regime signs it or not,” said the E.U. source over the weekend.
“If they don’t, the attacks from Israel and the U.S. will continue until there’s nothing left relating to its nuclear weapons programme, and everyone significant connected to it is dead – and all the while economic sanctions against Iran and its allies will keep being increased.” He added: “And if they do, there will still be no nuclear weapons programme, and there never will be one, although sanctions might start getting rolled back.” In either event, he concluded: “You have an Iran neutered of its nuclear threat and a compliant regime.”