The US’s sudden abandonment of Ukraine is concerning not just for Ukrainians. It extends to several geopolitical arenas, including Europe, Taiwan, and anywhere else where a smaller country is worried about being swallowed up by a larger neighboring one.
If America has stopped standing up to prevent stronger countries from invading weaker ones, many areas might become much less safe.
But in the narrow Israeli lens, there may be some substantial indirect advantages if a byproduct of Washington mending ties with Moscow is that Russian President Vladimir Putin leans in hard on Iran to strike a serious nuclear compromise.
No one has said explicitly that the deal US President Donald Trump is trying to force on Ukraine regarding the war with Russia involves a Russian promise to help America deal with the Iranian nuclear crisis, but the signs are there.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his regime loathe Trump with a passion.
Not long ago, they forced vice president Javad Zarif out of power to silence voices inside Iran who are in favor of negotiating with the West. That sent a message of unwavering brinkmanship to any Trump ideas of forcing Tehran into nuclear concessions.
And so, one would expect that the messages out of Iran would be of attack and resistance. But that is not what we have been hearing.
Rather, Tehran has been offering a daily zigzag of messages – one day trumpeting negotiations with the West as possible, the next day saying it’s impossible, and the next day again saying diplomacy is desirable.
All of this indicates that Iran is suddenly having to think seriously about diplomacy when it comes to Trump – something it never wanted to do.
Given that Trump has been a known factor for four months and in full power for five weeks, his being in office coupled with Israel’s military strength established since the war began did not shift the regime’s messaging alone.
It seems that Moscow’s shift on the issue – after at least three years of completely shielding Iran, which followed around a decade of mostly shielding it – has influenced the shift.
Khamenei and his followers may have missed an important memo.
Although the debate about how Israel and the West can best pressure Iran into compromising its nuclear-weapons program usually falls into pretty conventional camps – arguing for diplomacy by a united West or for military force – they often miss the profound importance of the East.
There is no question that the Islamic Republic could have achieved a more favorable nuclear deal under the Biden administration than it can get from Trump.
One of the reasons that Tehran took a pass was that it believed East-West relations had shifted so fundamentally that it was now permanently shielded by Russia and China.
And until the past couple of weeks, ties had chilled between the US and Europe on one side, versus Putin and his war against Ukraine on the other side, to the point of recalling Cold War relations.
But in the blink of an instant, all of that may be old news.
Putin has common interests with Iran, but he does not really care about it. Especially if the Ukraine war continues, Tehran was particularly helpful to Moscow by providing it with a huge volume of drones to terrorize Ukraine.
But if there is no war, thanks to Trump taking Russia’s side, Putin no longer needs Iran’s help.
Fall of Syria
Additionally, Russia and Iran have little to do jointly in Syria these days after the fall of the Assad regime to Sunni rebels, who do not want either of them using their country for proxy wars.
This would restore the general relationship in which Iran’s economy is desperate for Russia to shield it from Americans sanctions and UN condemnations, as well as needing Moscow’s military assistance.
Israel destroyed all five of Iran’s S-300 antiaircraft missile systems in October. Who will replace them if not Russia?
Tehran recently announced that it would buy Russia’s new SU-35 advanced aircraft. If Moscow chooses not to follow through on the sale, Khamenei would be stuck with his decades-old fleet, which is essentially useless against Israel.
In the years 2010-2013, Iran cracked for the first time and signed an interim nuclear deal, which led to its making its only real nuclear concessions ever. The 2015 JCPOA deal would never have happened with Russian support.
In a moment of hubris, former Iranian president Mohammad Ahmadinejad showed disrespect to the Russians over a variety of bilateral disagreements. Suddenly, Iran had no Russian protection – economic, diplomatic, or military – and was forced into signing.
Now, there were and remain many holes in the 2015 nuclear deal, and it should have been better. But Iran gave up the equivalent quantity of 10 nuclear bombs’ worth of enriched uranium and shut off about 75% of its uranium-enrichment centrifuges as part of the deal.
These are not insignificant concessions, and they probably wouldn’t have happened if Russia had backed Tehran at the time.
It is extremely difficult to see how far-ranging the impact of Washington’s detaching itself from Kyiv may be on the large number of conflicts across the globe.
But if Trump made a deal with Putin to lean hard on Khamenei, the mix of heightened diplomatic and economic pressure with no Russian protection, along with Israel’s much more viable military threat against Iran’s nuclear program, may finally checkmate the Islamic Republic into real concessions, which could bring to a close what has been an unending nuclear crisis.
If Khamenei misses that memo, the chances that he will have Russian military help to defend against the IAF may have just evaporated.