Khamenei, where is our fuel

 

“Khamenei, where is our fuel?”

The above message to its Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, was flashed on a number of hacked digital billboards in Iran as a group of cyber-attackers – calling themselves the “Predatory Sparrow” – shut down all the gasoline pumps across the entire nation in late October. As local protests rose because of a recent price hike at the pump, Iran was then slammed by a paralyzing freeze of gasoline and diesel fuel to consumers. Exceptionally cheap gasoline and diesel fuel, critical in a country whose economy has been decimated by sanctions from the United States and it allies, has been one of the theocracy’s key benefits to extract loyalty from its clearly repressed citizens.

According to NPR (October 27th): “Subsidies allow Iranian motorists to buy regular gasoline at 15,000 rials per liter. That's 5 cents a liter, or about 20 cents a gallon. After a monthly 60-liter quota, it costs 30,000 rials a liter. That's 10 cents a liter or 41 cents a gallon. Regular gasoline costs 89 cents a liter or $3.38 a gallon on average in the U.S., according to AAA.” 

Long since a pariah to US policy, since the coup that toppled the US-friendly Shah Pahlavi in 1979, Iran has declared itself to be a sworn enemy of the “Great Satan,” the United States. Holding US embassy personnel hostage for 444 days after the coup even toppled US President Jimmy Carter. Using its surrogates, Hezbollah and the Yemini Houthis, to sow instability across the Muslim world, Shiite Iran has provoked and antagonized Western powers, Israel and ultra-Sunni-conservative Saudi Arabia and their allies. Alliances with Shiite controlled Syria (the Assad regime) and majority-Shiite Iraq (thank you George W Bush) have further irked global powers seeking to contain Iran’s desire to spread its theocratic Shiite radicalism across the Muslim world. Sporadic military exchanges, including a US drone-strike assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport in January of last year, have peppered Iran’s relations with the Western world over the years.

Until the six nation, UN-sponsored Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was signed in 2015 (during the Obama years) in what seemed to be a successful if limited effort to contain Iran’s nuclear weapon development program, it was pretty clear that 36 years (since 1979) of extreme hostility between the United States and Tehran never abated. An autocratic and highly repressive regime, ready to crush local dissent, was totally unresponsive to the hardships imposed on its people by those sanctions. If anything, it rallied even skeptical Iranians further against the West, particularly the United States. JCPOA unfroze relations a little bit, until Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the accord in 2018… and Iran resumed its nuclear program.

While we are nowhere near fossil fuel independence, the writing is on the wall. Few new wells are being drilled and almost no new refineries are being put online. Oil and gas extraction still drives the majority of Iran’s economy, despite the sanctions. Its leaders are acutely aware of the global movement away from fossil fuels, so they have to be cognizant that their future will require much more engagement with the rest of the world, beyond resource extraction. It is thus no surprise, with a Democrat in the White House, that Iran has finally signaled a greater openness to resuming talks to exchange further nuclear weapons containment for a lifting of trade barriers and sanctions.

But as the cyber-attack on Iran’s service stations continues to illustrate, Middle Eastern tensions continue to be driven by the petroleum sector. As the BBC.com (October 28th) tells us, however, Iran has skirted directly attributing that attack to the United States: “Iran has said a foreign country was behind a cyberattack that paralysed its petrol distribution network on Tuesday [10/26]… A group called itself Predatory Sparrow claimed it carried out the hack, but Iran's top internet policy-making body blamed an unnamed ‘state actor’.” 

That little omission of mention of either the United States or Israel as that “state actor,” a significant break with Iran’s routine, is exceptionally significant. The sanctions, while deeply impactful on the daily lives of the Iranian public, have not moved the needle of détente much over the decades. Autocrats do not care. But engagement on a negotiated basis, given the obvious future of fossil fuels, worked in 2015 and could at least deescalate unnecessary tensions with Iran to the betterment of all. It’s time to shed an American sanction/confrontation policy that has never worked and accept the reality that one effort – JCPOA – generated the first genuine progress in over three decades of “nothing but confrontation.” Negotiation with allies is generally about trade and mutually advantageous protective treaties… the easy effort. Negotiation with enemies makes the world safer. 

On October 30th at the G20 Summit in Rome, a joint statement issued by President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron opened a door to Iran to remove those sanctions, “if Iran changes course.” The go-it-alone American policies of late seem to have given way to a new lock-step agreement among our traditional allies starting with resuscitating the JCPOA. Good news? Time will tell. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and if insanity is repeating the same action with an expectation of a different result, American sanctions against Iran coupled with constant confrontation and a refusal to negotiate, fit that definition.