Iran: The Long Game

IRAN

The Long Game

Iran has been playing a long game behind the scenes.

Iranian operatives have built up proxies in the Middle East using the same model that created Hezbollah, a militant political party in Lebanon that the United States and others consider a terrorist group, wrote Ranj Alaaldin, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, in the New York Times.

Iranian-backed fighters exercise significant control in Iraq and Syria, he argued. When the civil wars and fights against the Islamic State wind down in those countries, those fighters will remain, potentially reshaping the political landscape of the Middle East.

Saudi officials told Euronews that Iranian leaders also want to keep Yemen as a failed state. Saudi Arabia is now fighting Iranian-supported Shiite militias near Yemen’s southern border. An unstable Yemen is good for Iran’s cold war against the desert kingdom.

At the same time, the US Department of Justice recently accused nine Iranians of hacking hundreds of universities, private companies and government offices on behalf of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

“The hackers targeted innovations and intellectual property from our country’s greatest minds,” said Geoffrey S. Berman, US attorney for the Southern District of New York, in a statement.

Citing the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s research on Iranian cyberespionage, former CIA officer Christopher Burgess suggested in an article in CSO that the data breach was routine business for Iranian officials who have decided that hacking is the best way to bypass sanctions that block their country from accessing Western technology.

It’s not clear if hackers helped Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif bypass his country’s official ban against Twitter so that he could have a presence on social media. But he’s using special software to do so in a sign of his interest in exerting influence online, Al-Monitor said.

The most serious covert Iranian machinations have yet to bear fruit, however.

Iran might be respecting the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), reached with former US President Barack Obama and other countries that stopped its research on nuclear weapons. But hardliners in Iran today are surely preparing their case to start building a nuke immediately if President Donald Trump scraps the deal, said Foreign Policy.

“The hard-liners’ skepticism of diplomacy and resistance to compromise is partly rooted in their belief that no Iranian compromise can change Washington’s hostility to Tehran,” Foreign Policy wrote.

Trump’s appointment of John Bolton as national security advisor makes the scrapping even more likely, CNBC explained.

It’s debatable whether Iran’s machinations reflect its weaknesses or its strengths. Either way, those in Tehran are making chess moves.