Since the signature of the nuclear deal between Iran and six of the world's leading powers, commonly referred to in Iran by its Farsi acronym BARJAM, the position of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has been that the deal has “removed the shadow of war hanging over Iran… and real security has returned to our country”. According to a report by Raja News, a hardline outlet quoting several officials on Rouhani's team, this view is shared by the president's circle, including Iranian Foreign Minister Mohamed Javad Zarif. However, in a 17 February televised address, Iranian Supreme Leader ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that “it is said that in the absence of BARJAM Iran would have become engulfed in war. This is a pure lie.” The arguments presented by the radical camp in Iran, including Raja News, could prove telling. An article published on its website and widely shared by other hardline news outlets entitled “Which is insane? Which war?” read that “the [reformist] newspapers and servants of the current that is promoting westernisation [in Iran] in their writings aim to convince people that [US President Donald] Trump is an insane warmonger.” “Once people are convinced that Trump is unpredictable and crazy and a man who could take any action [at his choosing], they will be forced to elect a president [in Iran] whose stated policy is centred on ‘patience and toleration' and believes in detente with Trump” rather than resistance against him, Raja News said. For the hardliners, the moderate argument that should BARJAM collapse a war with the US under Trump would be inevitable is a propaganda tool designed to scare people off from resistance against Washington. According to Raja News, the motivation is to attract votes for Rouhani so that he can win the upcoming presidential elections in May. In support of Khamenei's remarks against the president and his team, an important position was taken by Iran's powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in an editorial in the 20 February issue of the weekly Sobhe Sadiq. The article in the publication of the IRGC's political body was entitled “The Invalidity of the Argument of either War or Peace”. The article said that the Rouhani administration “has taken Trump's aggressiveness as an opportunity… to portray him as an illogical and dangerous person… in order to create a discourse of ‘either war or peace' that could have a political application aimed at [shaping the outcome of the upcoming] elections in favour of the current administration” in Iran. It said that the moderates in Iran sought to portray resistance from their opponents — meaning the IRGC and the conservatives as a whole — against the US as dangerous and a symbol of warmongering. They thus sought to shape public opinion in such a way that those who had supported talks with the US and successfully concluded the nuclear deal were seen as having brought peace and security to the nation, the article said. It fiercely attacked this discourse of “either war or peace,” saying that this was in line with “the policies of the Zionists and Saudis” who had sought to use fears of Trump to “scare Iran and tame its revolutionary nature”. “This scenario of either war or peace, which is being pursued for electoral purposes, in fact serves the Zionists, the House of Saud [in Saudi Arabia] and the new administration in the US,” the editorial said. It added that there were six reasons why the US was incapable of engaging in a war with Iran, including the high financial costs, a lack of consensus both within the US and between the US and its allies on entering into a war with Iran, and the unpredictable consequences of such a war. It said that Trump's priorities were to fix America's domestic, rather than international, problems, that his policy was to avoid defending other nations such as Saudi Arabia, the Arabian Gulf states, and Israel at the expense of the US, and that Trump's business mindset did not favour military confrontations. It concluded by saying that the Iranian moderates' war-or-peace discourse was “opposed to Iran's national interests”. There are two explanations for Khamenei's position that the war-or-peace choice is “a pure lie”. The first is that he does not want to allow the moderates to continue using the argument in their platform for the upcoming presidential elections. Simply put, Khamenei wants to silence and disarm Rouhani and his supporters who have been deploying this rationale to marginalise Khamenei's own supporters among the radicals and their candidate(s) in the May elections. Since Khamenei's election as Iran's supreme leader in 1989, no Iranian president has seen eye-to-eye with him (Iran's presidents are elected by the direct vote of the people). Even former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who seemed to be Khamenei's favourite, had sharp disagreements and confrontations with Khamenei during his second term in office. The second explanation is that Khamenei does not want to give the impression to the new US administration that Iran is in a weak position and will submit no matter how aggressively Washington acts. Khamenei's message seems to be a warning to the US that if it imposes new sanctions on Iran or avoids renewing the sanctions waivers it is committed to under BARJAM, Iran will walk away from the agreement. He seems to want to impress upon the US that Iran is not afraid of the consequences of taking such a step because it knows that the US is not in a position to start a war with Iran. In an act of clear defiance of the US, Iran conducted a ballistic missile test just days after Trump's inauguration as US president in January. Additional missile tests in the future could be carried out on the assumption that even if BARJAM collapses, there will be no war between the US and Iran. Such a view is a misperception, however. It is true that Trump, an isolationist, does not seek a new war for the US and that he prioritises domestic issues. However, if the US were to impose new sanctions on Iran's banking and energy sectors on non-nuclear pretexts, for example because of the expansion of its missile programme, the agreement will collapse. That would result in Iranian retaliation, including the unstoppable expansion of its nuclear and missile programmes, and this could unwittingly drag the two states into war. Khamenei's assertion that it would be a lie to claim that in the absence of a nuclear deal war would be inevitable is thus a miscalculation. As prominent US international relations scholar Robert Jervis has put it, “war is most likely if you overestimate others' hostility but underestimate their capabilities.” The writer is an Iranian-Canadian political analyst writing on Iranian domestic and foreign affairs, the Middle East, and US foreign policy in the region.
