Both Harris and Trump may want a deal with a ‘desperate and vulnerable’ Iran

The 2024 US presidential election has been the backdrop for some eyebrow-raising statements about Iran from the candidates. 

US Vice President Kamala Harris surprised many when she said the Islamic Republic of Iran was the US’s “obvious” top geopolitical foe as opposed to China or Russia. In an interview last week, former US President Donald Trump said that if he was still in the White House, Iran would have joined the normalisation deals with Israel, known as the Abraham Accords.

Election day is less than one week away. Whichever candidate wins, their approach to Iran is likely going to set the course for their administration’s overall Middle East policy. 

Foreign policy insiders and surrogates in both the Trump and Harris campaigns who spoke with Middle East Eye agree on one thing: that Iran has been weakened by the conflicts spawned by the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attacks on southern Israel. 

Iran was knocked on its back heels by Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran over the summer, and now its devastating attacks on its closest ally, Lebanon's Hezbollah. Iran’s military inferiority to Israel - and the US weapons systems it deploys - was underscored on Friday when the Israeli military launched unprecedented strikes on Iran destroying many of its prized S-300 air defence systems and reportedly, a missile plant. 

Trump himself said in an interview with Al Arabiya last week before the Israeli attack: “In its own way, its [Iran] probably in danger…maybe more so than they would have thought a month ago…I think it's in a lot of danger.”

Many in the US believe Trump would be more hawkish on Iran, given his previous term in office. He unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal and ordered the assassination of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, Qassem Soleimani. His administration also pursued a campaign of “maximum pressure” on Iran. 

Fred Fleitz, a former National Security Council official in the Trump administration who is now at the America First Policy Institute Center for American Security, told MEE that if Trump returns to the White House, he is likely to ramp up sanctions enforcement on Iran. 

“He is going to bankrupt Iran and reimplement oil sanctions that the Biden administration has refused to enforce,” he said. “And there will be secondary sanctions against nations who violate our sanctions, which means the Chinese who buy Iranian oil will have to make a tough decision.” 

Iran’s oil exports surged between 2021 and 2023 to levels unseen since the Trump administration re-imposed sanctions on them, according to the US Energy Information Agency. At the time, the Biden administration was in rigorous talks to revive the nuclear agreement. Just before the war in Gaza erupted, it had reached a deal to free jailed Americans in Tehran. They were released but the US said it had withheld $6bn of Iranian oil revenue meant to be released as part of the deal. 

'We have to make deal'

Trump insists that he wants to renegotiate a nuclear deal with Iran but on tougher terms. In September, he said, "We have to make a deal because the consequences are impossible.” 

Asked about Trump’s comments, a former senior US official close to the Harris campaign told MEE that Harris is better placed to deliver a nuclear deal and blamed the Trump administration for Iran’s recent nuclear developments, “Maximum pressure failed.”

'Harris would engage Iran more promptly, but Trump has said he wants a nuclear deal...he will reach out via the Saudis or Indians'

- Robert Ford, Former US ambassador to Syria

Iran was in compliance with the nuclear deal when Trump withdrew in 2018 but rapidly advanced its programme afterwards. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in June that Iran was a few weeks away from producing enough fissile material to make a nuclear weapon.

Phillip Gordon, Harris’s national security advisor, all but accused the Trump administration of trying to overthrow the Islamic Republic. In an article for the Washington Post, Gordon claimed that “the apparent logic” of Trump’s sanctions was to “squeeze Iran’s economy so hard that the Iranian people will rise up and overthrow the regime”.  

With Harris still considered an unknown quantity on foreign policy, Gordon’s book, Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East, has become a framework for analysts and foreign governments to understand how Harris would approach the region. 

Robert Ford, the US’s former ambassador to Syria, told MEE that both Harris and Trump would likely try to engage in a nuclear deal. 

“Harris would engage Iran more promptly, but Trump has all but said he wants a nuclear deal. I imagine he will try to reach out to Iran through the Saudis or Indians,” Ford told MEE. 

A future Trump administration, however, is likely to be split between vehement Iran hawks like former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Senators Tom Cotton and Bill Haggerty, and on the other end, “America First” sceptics of Middle Eastern entanglements. The most coherent description of the latter’s view on Iran was spelt out by Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance in a podcast on Saturday. 

Vance pushed back on Israel’s escalation against Iran on the grounds that it was justified by the 7 October attacks. “The Israelis were like, ‘Okay, Hamas just attacked us. We’re gonna go really screw Hamas up…And the Iranians funded part of this, so we need to go to war with Iran…Our [US] interest very much is in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.” 

He added, “I don’t want Iran to get a nuclear weapon, and I think we should be… using all the influence we have to encourage them to not have a nuclear weapon…smart diplomacy really matters”.