When Iran’s Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh looks at his Saudi and UAE peers at the OPEC meeting in July, it will probably be with smugness that his fiercest rivals within the cartel haven’t been able to shut down the Islamic Republic’s oil exports or nuclear ambitions despite their best attempts.
After a year of some of the toughest U.S. sanctions ever, Tehran is still able to ship its crude undetected to certain buyers around the world. It has also been able to enrich uranium at home.
An emboldened Iran could complicate matters for OPEC next month. It could use its position as one of the cartel’s original five founding members to block any consensus from easily being reached by the 14-nation grouping, which largely takes its direction from Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih and his UAE counterpart Suhail al-Mazroui.
As the world’s only surviving commodity-support pact, OPEC has lasted nearly five decades through closed-door diplomacy, as arch-rivals like Saudi Arabia and Iran had to make decisions for the common good of the group, which in recent years has welcomed powerful non-member allies such as Russia.
Tehran has refused to quit OPEC despite being abandoned by Riyadh and Abu Dhabi amid U.S. sanctions, and even after the two colluded with Washington to add to its pain. In recent weeks, however, Iran too gave OPEC a taste of how difficult it could make things for the cartel, by withholding agreement to the rescheduling of the meeting originally slated in June.
Tehran Strengthened By Trump’s Inconsistencies
Iran is able to do all this partly because of inconsistencies by the very man trying to isolate the Islamic Republic from the rest of the world now: U.S. President Donald Trump.
In an interview with TIME magazine on Monday, Trump all but walked back from allegations made by members of his administration that Iran was responsible for last week’s attacks on two tankers in the Gulf of Oman, as well as other raids on Saudi and UAE energy assets last month. The president asserted that he thought Iran’s role in those attacks had been “very minor”.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported on Tuesday that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had privately delivered warnings intended for Iranian leaders that any attack by Tehran or its proxies resulting in the death of even one American service member will generate a military counterattack. And Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan said, a day before his abrupt resignation announced by Trump on Tuesday, he had authorized approximately 1,000 additional troops for “defensive purposes” in the Middle East.
However, in the past week Trump has shown a softly-softly approach to Iran, if anything. Days before the tanker attacks in the Gulf of Oman, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe traveled to Tehran with the tacit approval of the U.S. president to try and convince Iranian premier Hassan Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Allah Khamenei to make peace with Washington. After that failed spectacularly, Trump thanked Abe for the effort and was gracious toward Iran despite the snub it gave him:
"I personally feel that it is too soon to even think about making a deal. They are not ready, and neither are we!” the president tweeted.
Khamenei said a lot more, telling Abe that he didn’t think Trump “as worthy of any message exchange, and I do not have any reply for him, now or in future.”
When the flames from the stricken tankers in the Gulf made their impact around the world, it was Pompeo who pointed the finger at Tehran, not Trump.
Iran, meanwhile, ramped up its taunting of the U.S. on Tuesday, announcing an escalation of its nuclear program, which in 10 days will breach the limit on its stockpile of enriched uranium set under a 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
What’s Trump’s End Game For Iran?
All this restraint on Trump’s part begs the question: what could his end-game for Iran be?
It appears that what the president really wants is a new nuclear deal with Iran ahead of his re-election bid in 2020—a pact that could boost his political fortunes, not unlike the trade agreement with China he’s been trying to achieve.
If that’s not achievable, then he needs to avoid a war with Iran at all cost to ensure that oil prices don’t spike. As hard as it may be to believe, this is probably a bigger motivation to Trump than having his own version of the 2015 Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran that he tore up a year ago. For more than a year, the president has made battling high oil prices—and costly gasoline at U.S. pumps—one of his top priorities, not surprising given the negative impact these have historically had on incumbent presidents during elections.
Trump showed surprising indifference to the security of oil supplies in the Middle East in his TIME interview when he said he might take military action to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon but not to protect international oil supplies.
Just days earlier, the Saudi energy minister had expressed hope that world powers—a tacit reference to the U.S.—will do whatever’s needed to secure shipping routes for oil.
While the U.S. has maintained a commanding military deployment in the Middle East since the attacks, Trump’s own perspective suggests almost a rethink of U.S. policy in the region, if not its historical relationship with the Saudis. The president said:
“We have made tremendous progress in the last two and a half years in energy … we’re now an exporter of energy.”
He added:
“We’re not in the position that we used to be in in the Middle East where … some people would say we were there for the oil.”
That last line might make Iran’s oil minister a little more smug when he faces his Saudi and UAE peers over the next few weeks.