Paolo Confino, Nick Lichtenberg
Wed, October 11, 2023
Iranian Supreme Leader Press Office/Anadolu/Getty Images
A meticulously planned attack by Hamas on Israeli soil over the weekend left many with a gnawing question: How did it happen? Israel, considered to have some of the best intelligence services in the world, failed to learn about the attack ahead of time. Some have speculated that the level of coordination and deception could have only been possible with state support. For many, that left only one candidate: Iran.
Jacob Helberg has been a geopolitical risk forecaster for major American businesses for over a decade, including a stint at Google from 2016 to 2020 battling disinformation and foreign interference. He told Fortune that one thing is clear: “Hamas would have never been able to carry out an attack of this sophistication by land, air, sea, and cyber, in such a coordinated fashion, without Israeli or U.S. intelligence knowing, if this wasn’t completely orchestrated straight out of Tehran.”
Helberg also leads a group of private individuals who advise Congress on trade with China—the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission—and serves as a senior policy advisor to the CEO of defense contractor Palantir. He’s not alone in his viewpoint. Aaron Pilkington, an Air Force analyst specializing in Iranian studies (not to be confused with the Republican Arkansas state representative of the same name), wrote for Fortune and The Conversation that the current war in Gaza will serve Iran’s regional interests, regardless of whether the country was involved.
And on Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported Iran was in fact directly involved, citing sources in Hamas and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon that the U.S. considers a terrorist organization. The report detailed meetings between the Iranian military and Hamas that started as far back as August, at least two of which were attended by Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian. The Journal further reported that Iranian security officials helped Hamas plan its surprise attack.
By Wednesday, a separate report from the New York Times cited U.S. intelligence sources who said Iranian officials were caught off guard by the attacks. Those same sources added the caveat that the investigation into Hamas’s attacks was ongoing and could ultimately show Iranian participation.
Iran’s involvement in the attack, some say, was also an effort to stop Israel from negotiating diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia. Iran considers Saudi Arabia a rival, and Israel a sworn enemy, and any close ties between the two could be seen as a threat. For now, any deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia appears to be on hold. The Saudis will likely wait to assess their public’s reaction to Israel’s retaliation, and Israeli foreign policy is focused on the war, rather than diplomatic treaties.
The U.S. and Israeli governments have stopped short of claiming any direct involvement by Iran in the weekend’s attacks. On Sunday, the day after the attacks started, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. did not have evidence of Iranian involvement. A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the same. “We can’t yet say if [Iran] was involved in the planning or training” of the attacks, said Israeli Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari.
And yet officials from both Israel and the U.S. have hinted that they suspect Iran, given decades of close ties that the intelligence community sees between Iran and Hamas, Hezbollah, and other proxies around the Arab world. Israeli President Isaac Herzog called for “condemnation of Hamas, its allies, and its backers in Iran” without directly saying the latter had taken part in the weekend’s attacks, while a U.S. National Security Council spokesperson called Iran “complicit” in the attacks.
Iran’s ‘plausible deniability’
Iran has a long history of supporting Hamas, although the exact details of their relationship are of course not publicly known. Israel has previously claimed that Hamas receives $100 million a year from Iran. Additionally, a 2021 State Department report called Iran the “leading state sponsor of terrorism” and claimed that it funded terrorism across the Middle East, including by Hamas.
“The whole benefit for Iran of using Hamas as a surrogate is to try to shield itself from having to bear and absorb the direct cost of waging an attack on Israel,” Helberg says. “They’re using Hamas as a buffer to have plausible deniability so that the response will be against Hamas and not the Iranian state.”
One of America’s top political scientists doesn’t buy it. Ian Bremmer, founder of the geopolitical consulting firm Eurasia Group, told Fortune that despite its alleged links with Hamas, Iran’s recent actions don’t show a desire to further destabilize the region. “Everything Iran has been doing at a high level, strategically, has implied that they are not trying to go to war with Israel,” he said.
He pointed to several examples indicating that Iran is an unlikely candidate to have sponsored the Hamas terrorist attack. The country recently signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia, brokered by China, to restore full diplomatic relations between the historic rivals. Iran also agreed in 2015 to slow the pace of its uranium enrichment and let UN inspectors monitor its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. This openness to engaging with the UN took a turn last month, however, when Iran barred inspectors from accessing certain parts of its nuclear program. The nation also expects to receive $6 billion in previously frozen funds that are supposed to be spent on humanitarian aid, money it is unlikely to jeopardize by being tied to a terrorist attack in Israel.
On Tuesday, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Iran was not behind the attacks. He called statements about Iran’s involvement “nonsense comments.” Such remarks were to be expected, Bremmer says, adding they “tell you nothing.”
A new ‘axis’?
Helberg has a wider concern, though, about Iran possibly orchestrating the attack. “Iran, Russia, and China are in a de facto alliance,” Helberg said. “The main organizing principle around that alliance is a combination of anti-Americanism and a protest against the American-led rules-based order.”
Several respected opinion writers have speculated Hamas’s attacks in Israel are a sign of a weakening of the so-called Pax Americana, the relative global peace the U.S. had instilled across the world by deterring other countries from starting wars. For instance, longtime economics blogger Noah Smith wrote on his Substack that the “attack is a demonstration of America’s decreasing ability to deter conflict throughout the world.” Bloomberg Opinion columnist Hal Brands also saw ties between Iran, Russia, and China, which he called “revisionist actors.” Wrote Brands: “Connections between revisionist actors are stronger than at any time in decades.”
Helberg said he sees significant parallels between the military and foreign policy goals of all three countries. “You have Russia waging a campaign in Ukraine,” he said. “Iran effectively waging a campaign against Israel by way of Hamas. And China doing everything it can to prepare a potential campaign against Taiwan.”
There are clear ties between these countries, too. For its war against Ukraine, Russia has relied heavily on Iran for military equipment such as drones and missiles. In August, the U.S. asked Iran to stop selling Russia weapons, as a part of bilateral efforts to de-escalate tensions. Russia, in turn, has lent the Iranians its engineering expertise to help update their manufacturing of military drones, part of a broader information-sharing pact between the two. Foreign policy experts fear that further international condemnation and isolation could push Russia and Iran even closer.
Russia and China have built a close partnership, decades in the making, that is framed, if not exactly in opposition to the U.S., as a partial check on American dominance. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though, has complicated the relationship. China has been careful about denouncing Russia’s war in Ukraine, despite much of the world doing so. Since the war, the two countries have continued trade relations, with China a major purchaser of the discounted commodities Russia can’t sell elsewhere because of the many sanctions it is under. When delegations from the two countries met in May, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said that “pressure of illegitimate sanctions from the collective West” had brought the relationship to “an unprecedented high level.”
China has also developed increasingly closer ties to Iran. In 2021, China signed a massive, 25-year agreement with Iran that was a stepping stone to exerting greater influence in the region. Bremmer says China and Iran, in particular, have more of a transactional economic relationship than a full-fledged alliance, noting that they lack a joint defense agreement. Bremmer also notes that China has been slow-walking implementation of the Iran deal and that China has strong ties with Saudi Arabia, which in March was granted dialogue partner status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
China exerted some of its newfound geopolitical influence in March when it brokered the historic agreement to restore full diplomatic relations between rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia, with China casting itself in an unfamiliar, but likely sought after, role of global peacemaker. However, China’s national interests lie with the trade opportunities these agreements represented, according to Bremmer.
“The Chinese follow their economic interests, which right now require them to import huge amounts of oil from the Gulf region,” Bremmer said. “But that need does not discriminate between Iran and Saudi Arabia, historically rivals.”
Bremmer is also not convinced about clear-cut ties between Russia, China, and Iran.
“I don’t really understand people saying that China and Iran are in an alliance,” he says, not referring specifically to Helberg. “That to me speaks about people who don’t know a lot about the region or about China’s relations in the region. That strikes me as an easy shorthand for Americans that put all countries that they don’t like or don’t trust in the same basket.”
The Iran-Russia friendship exists mostly because other countries have shunned them: “They don’t have many countries that like them,” Bremmer concludes.
China and Russia both offered muted statements of support for Israel over the past week. The Chinese statement in particular frustrated American officials. In a rare show of open criticism from high-ranking government officials, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) expressed his disappointment directly to President Xi Jinping during a meeting in Beijing. While Russia, who had already angered Israel because of its continued ties to Iran, said it was “concerned” but offered essentially no condemnation of Hamas. In another statement on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the attacks were an example of the U.S.’s “failure” in the Middle East.
The American foreign policy apparatus, also known as “the blob” in D.C., has a long history of angst over Iran, dating back to at least the 1950s, when the CIA backed a coup to overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and replace him with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. Pahlavi’s reinstatement laid the groundwork for the Iranian revolution that took place in 1979 and forever after compromised its relationship with the U.S.
More recently, President George W. Bush rattled the American-led international order in 2002 when he declared Iran, along with North Korea and Iraq, to be part of an “Axis of Evil”—a proclamation that presaged two decades of American-led war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Middle East that only concluded in 2021, when President Joe Biden withdrew the last forces from Afghanistan. Now, just a few years later, the situation is front and center for the blob, once again.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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