The US’s recent sudden abandonment of Ukraine could be scary news not just for Ukrainians, but also in a number of geopolitical arenas, from Europe to Taiwan to anywhere else where a smaller country is worried about being swallowed up by a neighboring larger country.
If America has stopped standing up for preventing stronger countries from invading weaker ones, many parts of the planet may become much less safe.
However, from a narrow Israeli lens, there could 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 US President Donald Trump’s deal with Putin about Ukraine involves a Russian promise to help America deal with the Iranian nuclear crisis.
But the signs are there.
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks with defense industry experts in Tehran, Iran, February 12, 2025 (credit: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS)
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks with defense industry experts in Tehran, Iran, February 12, 2025 (credit: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS)
Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his regime loathe Trump with a passion.
Not long ago, they forced Javad Zarif out of power as a government vice president to silence voices in the Islamic Republic that are pro-negotiating with the West so as to send a message of unwavering brinkmanship to any Trump ideas of forcing them into nuclear concessions.
And so one would expect only messages of attack and resistance to negotiations to emerge from Iran.
That is not what we have been hearing.
Rather, Iran has been a daily zig zag of messages, one day trumpeting negotiations with the West as possible, the next day saying its impossible, and the next day saying diplomacy is desirable again.
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All of this shows that Iran is suddenly having to think seriously about diplomacy with Trump, something it never wanted to do.
Given that Trump has been a known fact for four months and in full power for five weeks, him being in office and Israel’s military superiority (established back in October) did not shift the regime’s messaging alone.
It seems that Moscow’s shift on the issue after at least three years if shielding Iran completely, and 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 giving up or backtracking its nuclear weapons program usually falls into pretty conventional camps who argue 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 face off with Trump.
One of the reasons that Tehran took a pass was that it believed that East versus West relations had shifted so fundamentally that it was now permanently shielded by Russia and China.
And until the last couple weeks, it seemed that a new Cold War had taken hold between the US and Europe versus Putin over his invasion of Ukraine, one which could rival the former 50-year Cold War from the last century.
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 the country.
Especially if the Ukraine war was continuing, Tehran was particularly helpful to Moscow by providing them with a huge volume of drones with which to terrorize Ukraine.
But if there is no war, thanks to Trump taking Russia’s side, Putin no longer needs Iranian help.
Fall of Syria
Russia and Iran also have little to do jointly in Syria these days given 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 US sanctions, from UN condemnations, as well as needing Moscow’s military assistance.
For example, Israel destroyed all five of Iran’s S-300 anti aircraft missile systems in October.
Who will replace them if not Russia?
Also, Tehran recently announced that Moscow would sell it new SU-35 advanced aircraft.
If Russia chooses not to follow through on the sale, Khamenei is stuck with his decades old fleet which is essentially useless against Israel.
Going back to the 2010-2013 period when Iran broke for the first time and signed an interim nuclear deal which led to its making its only real nuclear concessions ever in the 2015 nuclear deal, this would never have happened with Russian support.
In a moment of hubris, then-Iranian president Mohammad Ahmadinejad disrespected the Russians over a variety of bilateral disagreements.
Suddenly, Iran had no Russian economic, diplomatic, or military protection, and was forced into the nuclear deal.
There were and are many holes in the 2015 nuclear deal, and it should have been better.
But Iran did give up the equivalent quantity of 10 nuclear bomb’s worth of enriched uranium and did shut off around 75% of its uranium-enriching centrifuges as part of the deal – not insignificant concessions which it would never have done if Russia had backed it 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 Khamanei, the mix of skyrocketing diplomatic and economic pressure with no Russian protection, along with Israel’s now 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.
And if Khamenei misses that memo. as well, the chances that he will have Russian military help to defend against the Israeli air force may have just evaporated.