Trump, Iran and the Obama Strategic Blueprint

Alastair Crooke, 9 January 2025

Like a smashed antique clock -- with its elaborate cogs, ratchet wheels and innards splayed out from the casing -- so the mechanics of the Middle East lie similarly exposed and broken. All the region is in play -- Syria, Lebanon, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt and Iran.

The original Obama strategic blueprint for containing and balancing the potentially violent energies of West Asia was subsequently handed to Team Biden at the end of the Obama term -- and it still clearly bore the Obama imprimatur right up until its collapse after 7 Oct 2023.

Netanyahu deliberately smashed its mechanics: In acts of wanton destruction, he destroyed the prevailing status quo, which he saw as an American straitjacket preventing the attainment of a Greater Israel reaching out to its ‘Grand Victory’. Netanyahu resented the American constraints -- though by breaking the extant mechanism, paradoxically, instead of liberating Israel, he may have unleashed dynamics that will prove far more threatening (i.e. in Syria).

The cornerstone to the Obama ‘balanced region’ was contained in a secret letter sent to Iran’s Supreme Leader in 2014, in which, as the WSJ relates, Obama proposed to Khamenei joint efforts in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State (where ISIS controlled territory). This joint action however, was made contingent on Iran reaching a nuclear deal with the US.

The letter explicitly acknowledged Iran’s ‘equities’ in Syria: To assuage Iran’s concerns about the future of its close ally, President al-Assad, the letter stated that the US’s military operations inside Syria were not targeted at President Assad or his security forces.

The Obama understanding with Khamanei, it must be noted, thus implicitly extended to Hizbullah who were joined with Iran in fighting ISIS in Syria:

“Among other messages conveyed to Tehran, according to U.S. officials at the time, is that US military operations in Iraq and Syria aren’t aimed at weakening Tehran or its allies”.

Of course, the Obama undertakings to Iran were lies: Obama had already signed in 2012 (or earlier), a secret Presidential Finding (i.e. an instruction) for US intelligence support to Syria’s rebels in their bid to oust President Assad).