PORTLAND - The United States squeezes Iran and pushes it into a corner where Iran has little choice but to either submit or push back and fight. And when Iran pushes back it is called a rogue or terrorist state and America’s enemy; and when it takes on the rapprochement option, it is invariably spurned. As you will read, Iran has tried rapprochement with the U.S. but has been rebuffed on a number of occasions, in one case with the conduit being me. Why has the United States acted so? Is there light at the end of the tunnel between these implacable adversaries? What should Iran do now and what are its options?

Although the history of American-Iranian animosity could be traced to the August 1953 CIA coup that toppled Iran’s legitimately elected prime minister, the more recent cataclysmic event that still permeates hostile relations was the 1979 student annexation of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The students captured 66 American citizens and held 52 of them for over a year. Although no Americans died, this tragic episode was inflamed when the students further infuriated Americans by routinely parading the hostages before cameras, an unnecessary provocation that was displayed on American television every night by those hostile to Iran, causing Americans great humiliation and anger.

Reportedly, many assert that the United States gave Iraq the green light to attack Iran, or at least encouraged the war to so weaken Iran that it would release the hostages.

America did not stand still in its quest to free the hostages. However, its major effort to do so, Operation Eagle Claw, was aborted in the Iranian desert. In 1980, Iraq invaded an Iran paralyzed in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, in part to get better access to the Persian Gulf. Reportedly, many assert that the United States gave Iraq the green light to attack Iran, or at least encouraged the war to so weaken Iran that it would release the hostages. The United States supported Iraq politically at the United Nations and even facilitated the transfer of internationally banned chemical weapons after Iran managed to evict the Iraqi army and threatened Iraq’s second largest city, Basra. Thousands of Iranians were killed by these illegal weapons of mass destruction and one could see dozens of victims visible on the streets of Tehran wearing oxygen tanks throughout the 1990s. 

Concurrently, the United States began a program of economic sanctions against Iran beginning in 1979, starting with asset freezes and ramping up to a smorgasbord of sanctions over the years that have crippled and continue to cripple Iran’s economy and severely limit the economic wellbeing of all Iranians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_against_Iran).  Over the years, sanctions have reduced Iran’s exports, crucial imports and its access to international finance, capital markets and technology. Arguably, Iran has been the most sanctioned country in the world over the last 40 or so years. These sanctions have been spearheaded by the United States, and are today at their extreme. The sanctions are not limited to Iran, but are threatened and imposed on any third country that dares to deal with Iran—commonly referred to as secondary sanctions—in order to deter economic engagement with Iran. It is difficult to overestimate the adverse fallout of sanctions on Iran. Unlike armed conflicts when peace ushers in a new era, the impact of many kinds of sanctions will be felt for years into the future due in part to the real possibility that the sanctions could be re-imposed at the drop of a hat, thus deterring economic engagement with Iran.

During 1980-81, in the midst of an ongoing war with Iraq with little access to military equipment, and faced with political isolation, economic sanctions and military threats in the region, Iran pushed back in the best ways it could. Iran supported and nourished Hezbollah in Lebanon as its most important surrogate in the region to counteract U.S. and Arab pressure on the Iranian regime’s survival. In October of 1983, the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut were bombed, killing 220 marines, 18 sailors and 3 army servicemen. Islamic Jihad, very loosely connected to Iran, was assumed to be responsible for the carnage, which resulted in an adverse fallout for Iran. Iran also closed ranks with the Al-Assad regime in Syria, the only Arab country that supported Iran in its struggle with Iraq. The rich Persian Gulf Arab states financed and politically supported Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Iran needed friends wherever it could find them, as it faced America’s crippling political, military and economic isolation.

The Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988 and Iran was hopeful that its isolation would also end. In 1991-1992, and after the death of Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran sought to earnestly begin rapprochement with the United States. During the period when two Arab governments, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, asked me to help restore their relations with Iran, a senior member of Iran’s government asked me to help establish a dialogue with the United States in order to improve relations. To establish my authenticity as an intermediary, I was told of a message that the President of the United States had apparently sent to Iran, a communication that only a handful of people in the United States were privy to. I asked a highly placed friend in the State Department to facilitate a meeting for me with the appropriate person in the State Department.

I was ushered into a big room. The chief counsel of the U.S. Department of State (I don’t recall his name but I think he was the Assistant Secretary or Deputy Secretary) sat on a couch. I sat on another couch across from him. The chief counsel introduced me to another man saying he wanted to have a third person present since the issue was Iran. I told him the secret message that I had been told to mention in order to establish my credentials. He listened to what I had to say about Iran’s desire for developing better relations. His remarks were astonishingly brief: Mr. Askari, you would do well to forget what you reported as a message from our president to Iran. While we appreciate any assistance you can give to American companies in their dealings with Iran, we do not want you involved in our dealings with Iran. The meeting lasted less than 15  minutes. I came out of the room amazed at how I had been essentially threatened and how little interest there was in establishing better relations with Iran. 

Iran invited American companies to participate in its oil and natural gas industries and in infrastructure projects but the initiatives were quickly shut down by President Clinton.

Iran tried other avenues for rapprochement, knowing full well that the business of America was business. Iran invited American companies to participate in Iran’s oil and natural gas industries (with Iran having larger combined deposits—oil equivalents—of natural gas and oil than Saudi Arabia), in other mining ventures and in infrastructure projects. Initiatives that looked promising were quickly shut down by President Clinton, resulting in 1996 in the Iran Libya Sanctions Act and with more sanctions on tap. 

Then after the tragic events of 9/11, from a distance I imagined a new opportunity for improving Iran-U.S. relations. The United States was determined to invade Afghanistan to capture Osama bin Laden and leaders of the Taliban who had aided bin Laden. The United States sought the support of leaders opposed to the Taliban. Iran and the Taliban were mortal enemies. The United States managed to partner, through Iran, with the Northern Alliance, a close ally of Iran whose leader Ahmad Shah Massoud had been assassinated by Al Qaeda suicide bombers posing as journalists just two days before the 9/11 attacks. Iran blessed and supported the U.S. cooperation with the Northern Alliance. I thought, what an opportunity for reproachment! This cooperation was further strengthened when Iran’s top commander, the late General Qassem Soleimani, also assisted in the fight against the Taliban. I became even more hopeful when General Soleimani supported the Iraqi militias in 2003. However, Iran nurtured and supported Iraq’s Shia militias who were later seen as American adversaries or at least as unhelpful by the United States. Sadly, Iranian and American interests in Iraq soon diverged as Shia militias, allied with Iran, fought and killed many U.S. servicemen using IEDs. Once again, interests diverged and Soleimani, and by extension Iran, was now seen as an enemy by the United States.  

Still Soleimani was later instrumental in the fight that followed against ISIS, something that has been acknowledged by members of the U.S. military.

In 2008, I finally “grew up” and saw the light. Israel was the key. Israeli interests, in my opinion mistakenly, viewed the regime in Tehran as an existential threat and had pressured the United States into believing that the clerics and the Islamic Republic were a danger to Israel’s existence and to U.S. interests in the region. So I wrote an op-ed, “The Clerics should embrace Israel,” which appeared in the New York Times on October 21, 2008 (https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/opinion/21iht-edaskari.1.18036140.html) and was reproduced in the International Herald Tribune on November 22, 2008. My message then (although harder to envisage now) was if Iran wants to have workable relations with the United States it should first establish some sort of relations with Israel. I felt my opinion was later in part confirmed during a luncheon on K-Street, arranged by an ex-student with a former senior Israeli intelligence executive who had requested a meeting; during the conversation he essentially said that Israel saw the regime in Tehran as an existential threat but did not fear the Arabs because the Arab leaders were incompetent and focused on their survival and luxurious lives. He also felt that America’s experts on Iran knew very little about developments in the Islamic Republic. I left the lunch with little hope of improved relations between the United States and Iran. I was disheartened because the isolation of Iran would in the end lead to adverse relationships, a self-fulfilling prophecy of classifying Iran as a mortal enemy.

The Israelis, with immeasurable influence on U.S. Middle East policy, wanted the regime in Tehran gone but the clerics were staying put. Something had to give.

In the meantime, Iran had not remained idle and had ramped up its missile production for hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles and drones to combat enemies as it lacked world class aircrafts and other deterrents. It had also expanded its nuclear enrichment beginning in the late 1990s, but was still no match for the weapons and bombs the United States had showered on Israel and for Israel’s vast arsenal of nuclear warheads or even for the rich Arab countries in the Persian Gulf. Iran’s proxies or allies had also become more formidable, especially Hezbollah; the Shia militias in Iraq, a part of the Iraqi armed forces, had solid relations with Iran and were close to General Soleimani; relations with the Assad regime in Syria had been further cemented as Hezbollah and Iran had been indispensable for Assad; Iran had also strengthened its relations with the Houthis in Yemen and was no longer adversarial with Hamas.

In part because of Iran’s progress in the nuclear field, the United States spearheaded an agreement to at least delay Iran’s march toward developing a nuclear warhead and its delivery. So in 2015, after extensive secret negotiations in Oman, an agreement (JCPOA) was reached between Iran and a group of world powers, representing the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China) plus Germany and the European Union. It was seen as a triumph of diplomacy and President Obama later made the gesture of calling Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian President, as he departed the United States after his visit to the United Nations. Maybe there was hope and maybe I was wrong to be so pessimistic? Everyone seemed pleased except Israel and less than a handful of Arab regimes. Israel cried foul but it had been kept out of the loop to pre-empt its lobbying to derail the deal.

All sides adhered to their obligations under the nuclear deal, but the honeymoon fell apart under intense Israeli pressure, resulting in President Trump unilaterally withdrawing from the JCPOA as well as imposing new economic sanctions on Iran in May of 2018. What a tragedy, America had signed an agreement and decided to withdraw and abrogate it in order to pacify its domestic Zionist lobby.  President Trump further inflamed the region by moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights. Then in June 2019 President Trump did the unthinkable by crossing a solid international red line—he ordered a drone attack at Baghdad airport in the sovereign country of Iraq—assassinating Iran’s top military commander General Soleimani and an Iraqi militia leader and part of the Iraqi armed forces. Soleimani was feared by Israelis as an implacable enemy and Netanyahu’s relations with the Trump family, especially with Jared Kushner, had sadly delivered. Yet this episode was sure to linger in the minds of many Muslims in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and all those who sought justice for Palestinians. We have to ask ourselves a number of questions. Who has the right to call the top general of another country a terrorist and assassinate him in a third country? Are those who order such assassinations and those who carry them out also legitimate targets for future assassinations? We may have opened a new Pandora’s box that will be hard to close!

As I wrote over 15 years ago in my NYT op-ed, it is difficult to have good relations with the United States if a country has hostile relations with Israel, this is something that I continue to believe passionately today but I would add: it is possible to have good relations with the U.S. if a country has strong corporate ties in the United States and has no, or at least not hostile, relations with Israel. America’s relations with Israel are the most transparent example of a relationship where the tail is wagging the dog.

Protecting Israel’s crimes also denigrates the authority of the UN Security Council.

There is much evidence for this claim, but briefly this includes America’s financial and military aid to Israel, a country that is richer than France or Germany; dozens of American vetoes at the UN Security Council to protect Israeli transgressions that contravene international law and that make a mockery of America’s claim of upholding international law. Protecting Israel’s crimes also denigrates the authority of the UN Security Council. America now openly breaks its own laws by supplying lethal arms to Israel as it watches Israel deny food and medicines to starving and injured women and children. America brazenly threatens judges on the International Court of Justice and at the International Criminal Court not to look into cases brought against Israel and its generals and prime minister. 

There are also human tragedies affecting Americans, but not all tragedies are treated the same by the U.S. administration. For instance, after the tragic death of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, President Biden, on August 31, condemned the murder of this dual citizen of Israel and the United States and went on to say “Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes.” But earlier there was no such reprimand when Ay?enur Ezgi Eygi, 26, “a US-Turkish dual citizen and a native of Seattle was shot dead by Israeli forces on August 6 while peacefully protesting against illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.” There is obviously a marked difference between our concern for a dual citizen of Israel and our concern for a dual citizen of Turkey. American duplicity is telegraphed for the world to see. There was little or no public reprimand of Israel by the United States when an American journalist, Jeremy Loffredo, was detained by the Israel Defense Forces on October 9 for aiding and sharing information with the enemy, apparently because of his reporting on Iranian strikes. Also, the United States finds it merely “disturbing” when confronted with reports that Israel is using Palestinians as human shields and forcing them to go into tunnels ahead of the IDF but then we turn around and blast Hamas for reports of their using civilians as human shields by allegedly hiding in schools and hospitals. 

Pew Research Poll confirms how badly we are viewed in the world. Ours is a tarnished USA and much of it I believe is due to our blind support of Israel and its policies.

We call Israel a democracy with a free press, when in reality it is a country that has banned foreign reporting on the destruction and human carnage in Gaza and in the West Bank, a country that is rightly seen by much of the world as a classic case of an apartheid regime, with different sets of laws for Israeli Jews, for Palestinian Israelis and for Palestinians, a country that has been engaged in ethnic cleansing since 1947-1948, that is now fully engaged in genocide and that commits war crimes on a daily basis. America is Israel’s partner in crime! Americans have to wake up and consider the repercussions of what we are doing. Our own research poll, the widely respected Pew Research Poll, confirms how badly we are viewed in the world. Ours is a tarnished USA and much of it I believe is due to our blind support of Israel and its policies—the confiscation of Palestinian homes and land with no compensation (whereas Germany paid reparations for the tragedy of the Holocaust and here we have the confiscation of real assets too) and no right of return (remember that Arabs or Palestinians were about 94 percent of the population of what is now Israel, Gaza and the West Bank), ethnic cleansing, genocide and war crimes.

Israel is arrogant and shows little empathy for the injustice and suffering it has inflicted and continues to inflict on Palestinians. Israel seems to believe it can do anything—bully, kill, incarcerate, destroy homes and infrastructure and ignore world opinion and international law because it is supported by the United States, the global hegemon that is willing to deprive its own disadvantaged and instead donate resources to Israel, a country that is already rich. 

So if we return to our original question, what can and will Iran do now that its allies have been so badly damaged by Israel with the full support of the United States? Can Iran and the U.S. restore relations in the foreseeable future? The short answer to this question is NO. The Zionist lobby in the United States will not tolerate good relations between the U.S. and Iran until Israel has good relations with Iran, something that is not on the horizon.

So where did the United States go wrong?

The United States has for too long made its Middle East foreign policy subservient to Israel’s wishes. While we armed Ukraine to defend itself against Russian aggression, at the same time we armed Israel to take Palestinian lands, to engage in ethnic cleansing and perpetrate a genocide! Israel is now out of control, it has gone rogue, it is in danger of being indicted by the International Court of Justice (the world’s highest court) and having arrest warrants issued for its leaders by the International Criminal Court. Israel is dragging the United States down with it as its accomplice in crime. We must begin treating Israel as a close ally and not as a spoilt child , a brat, who knows he can do anything because we will always come to his rescue and spoil him some more.

Where did Iran and Iranians go wrong? 

Iranian decision makers have faced sanctions, yes, but the country would be in much better economic shape if they had adopted sound and consistent economic policies and tackled corruption, which has been rampant.

In defending the country against external enemies, Iran relied on a number of allies, principally Hezbollah and to a lesser extent Iraqi militias, the Houthis, Syria and Hamas and an effective missile program, yet it did not develop a nuclear warhead and its delivery system, something that would have given the country the needed leverage against its enemies. Now Iran is always reacting to Israel. Iran should do all it can to get Iraq to expel all U.S. forces from its soil, not next year but this week. It is apparent that Iran’s arsenal of hypersonic missiles can effectively penetrate Israel’s American-supported air defense shield and are highly accurate. Iran and Hezbollah have targeted military installations and not residential sites, while Israel has focused its attacks in Gaza and in Lebanon on hospitals, schools and safe zones, slaughtering in excess of 43,000 known civilians not counting bodies that are still buried under the rubble and those whose death will later be attributed to the utter deprivation of simple medical attention and food. Iran could have and still can seriously impair Israel’s military installations. There are experts who say Iran’s surrogate policy and reliance on missiles have failed. They are wrong. What is true is that Iran has used them in a timid and piecemeal manner to signal to Israel and the United States that it could cause much more damage, giving Israel warning and enabling the United States to re-enforce Israel, deploy more U.S. assets in defense of Israel and be on alert to attack Iran and its allies if it so chooses. After so many provocations by Israel—assassinations on Iranian soil and on its consulate in Syria— Iran, supported by its allies could have unleashed a coordinated all-out barrage of missiles on every Israeli military installation to decimate the Israeli war machine, but it chose to tread softly and as result it has backed itself into a corner. 

Instead of unhelpful rhetoric Iran could have, and still can, refer the United States to the International Court of Justice for complicity in Israeli the crimes, including genocide, committed by Israel. Iran could engage lawyers, or possibly the same legal team that drafted South Africa’s case against Israel, to connect U.S. complicity—supply of specific weaponry and their continued replenishment, intelligence tied to specific Israeli crimes, political support enabling crimes and financing. Yes, this would not yield immediate and specific results, but it would present the United States with a big black eye, especially if a few other countries had the courage to join Iran’s case, and may open the eyes of more Americans to what is being done in their name and its ramifications for the United States. 

 Iran should be playing targeted, comprehensive and well-designed offense instead of always reacting piecemeal in defense.

In short, Iran should be playing targeted, comprehensive and well-designed offense instead of always reacting piecemeal in defense.

What are Iran’s options now?

In addition to adopting sound economic policies, tackling corruption, enhancing its intelligence services, urging Iraq to expel all U.S. forces as swiftly as possible, producing more hypersonic and ballistic missiles and drones, Iran should consider two options that might have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Iran could invite Russia to position a squadron of its advanced planes (such as the Su-57) in southern Iran (as part and parcel of a defense pact) along with an upgraded battery of Russian air defense systems and notifying the United States and Israel that they will attack any and all intrusions (and their source of origin) into Iranian air space; these are difficult times when Iran must project comprehensive strength. This could be sufficient to deter the United States and Israel from launching an attack on Iran. To further deter any aggression, Iran along with other countries of the Persian Gulf, could issue a strong joint statement deploring Israel’s veiled threat of using nuclear weapons and recalling that they have expressed a preference to declare the entire region a nuclear free zone but Israel and the United States, duplicitous warriors against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, have resisted. 

Iran faces difficult choices, it must consider all of its options, be bold and act now on a number of fronts without further ado.

*Hossein Askari is an emeritus professor of business and international affairs, George Washington University

[The views expressed in this article are those of the author.]