A lynchpin in the already precarious relationship between the US and Iran was broken this week with the dual assassination of top Hizbullah military commander Fouad Shukr in Beirut and, more significantly because it took place on Iranian soil, and that of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

Israel acknowledged responsibility for Shukr’s assassination but has not to date commented on the targeting of Haniyeh while he was attending the inauguration of the new Iranian President Masoud Pezekshian in Tehran on 31 July.

Haniyeh was a veteran Hamas leader and the organisation’s more moderate political face. He was, moreover, the chief negotiator in the ongoing talks with Israel aimed at reaching a ceasefire in Gaza, a plan at last condoned by the US, in return for the freeing of Israeli hostages held by Hamas since 7 October.

In the wake of verbal warnings by Iran of retribution against Israel, the US announced the deployment of additional ballistic missile defense-capable cruisers and destroyers to the Gulf, as well as fighter jets and its Lincoln Carrier Strike Group.

Four months before the US presidential elections in November, it remains to be seen how the current or any future administration will manage its policy on Iran, which despite the flareup of tensions over the past ten months — exchanges of fire between Israel and Hizbullah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen — had remained more or less contained at the behest of Washington.

The Biden administration had in September of last year issued a waiver giving Tehran access to $6 billion of its frozen oil revenue funds, to be utilised for humanitarian purchases. The arrangement led to the release of five Iranian nationals detained in the US in return for the release of five Americans held in Tehran. Except for this initiative, which was heavily criticised by Republicans as a sellout to terrorism, improving ties with Iran was not a priority of the Biden administration’s. 

The question of renewing the entente with Iran, which had been put in place by the Obama administration in 2015 — and by means of which Tehran would reduce and partially eliminate its stockpiles of uranium — was not revisited after it was scrapped by the then president Donald Trump in May of 2018. 

Tensions between Iran and the US were further exacerbated under Trump’s Republican administration with the assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Quds Force Commander Qasem Suleimani in Syria in January of 2020. In the wake of the 7 October attack on Israel by Hamas last year, the sentiment versus the Biden administration’s policy on Iran took a steep downturn, even among Democrats, with the perception that Tehran was fuelling the Hizbullah-Houthi axis of resistance against Israel.

In November 2023 the US House of Representatives passed a bipartisan measure that included a sizable number of Democrats. The No Funds for Iranian Terrorism Act permanently froze again and denied Iran’s access to the $6 billion of sanctioned Iranian assets that had been released under the Biden-approved deal. Before he dropped out of the presidential race on 21 July, Biden was heavily criticised across both sides of the political divide for his Iran policy. He was asked to redesignate the Houthis of Yemen a terrorist organisation in the wake of a drone attack on Tel Aviv on 21 July.

Up until the dual assassinations of Shukr and Haniyeh, however, confrontations between Iran and Israel (backed by the United States) had been contained, with neither Washington nor Tehran inclined to engage in any wide military confrontation. Now, the dynamics of hostile coexistence are on the brink. The Biden administration and its international allies are warning that current tensions could spill out into all-out war across the region.

Writing in the Financial Times on 2 August, the head of the Council on Foreign Relations and former diplomat Richard Haas posited the question “what next, and what should the US do about it?” Haas recommends that despite the seeming inevitability of a war breaking out, and of Iran’s responding to the “humiliation of Haniyeh’s assassination on its soil”, the US should exert pressure on Israel to “remain open to a diplomatic approach to the situation in southern Lebanon”. He also argues that US control over arming Israel can help it exercise discretion as to how these arms might be used.

To date, however, the Biden administration has unequivocally shown that it will tolerate Netanyahu’s excesses and his determination to continue the war on Gaza. While verbally censuring these excesses, the Biden administration continues to send military backups enabling the continuation of the war. Iran for its part has clearly stated that the Israeli aggression against Gaza will continue to be the primary justification for the targeting of Israeli territory. The recent assassinations have added fuel to the fire.

It is not expected that the current trajectory in US-Iran relations will change much within the context of a US foreign policy in which support of Israel is a fundamental cornerstone, and events could continue to spiral until the election.

“A Harris administration would mostly be an extension of the current administration in foreign policy and in world view,” said New York-based political commentator Mohamed Setouhi, adding that the return to an arrangement similar to the Iran nuclear deal brokered by the Obama administration in 2015 will be “more difficult than anticipated, and no longer a priority, given Iran’s advances in uranium enrichment”.

The chances of a more aggressive US policy on Iran could increase if a Republican administration headed by Donald Trump comes to power according to Setouhi. “Iran’s objective to remain a nuclear threshold country, a situation with which Washington has obviously been okay to date, is yet to be tested under a second Trump administration. If Netanyahu fails once again to get Biden to attack Iran and its nuclear programme, he can bet on a more cooperative administration under Trump.”

In the meantime, pressure exerted by Israel on the current as well as impending administration could lead to “more confrontations with Iran pushing the Middle East to the brink of full scale war,” Setouhi said. “Washington, while opposed to this, could still be sucked into such a war and along with it several Arab countries, as part of an anti-Iran alliance.”

* A version of this article appears in print in the 8 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly