The US increases pressure on Iran with ten warships The Russians ready to evacuate the Bushehr nuclear power plant
The Trump administration is increasing pressure on Iran. Yesterday, Washington increased the warships deployed in the Middle East to a total of ten units. On the other hand, the armed forces of the Islamic Republic received a batch of one thousand drones. “In line with future threats, the army maintains and enhances its strategic advantages for rapid combat and to impose a crushing response against any aggressor,” Iranian Army Commander-in-Chief Amir Hatami said. Not only that.
Tehran has also announced that it will carry out military exercises in the Strait of Hormuz next week. «Today we must be prepared for a state of war. Our strategy is that we will never start a war, but if it is imposed, we will defend ourselves”, said the Iranian vice-president, Mohammad Reza Aref, who then called for “guarantees” for possible negotiations with Washington. Reuters has meanwhile reported that Ali Khamenei’s regime is implementing a campaign of mass arrests to dissuade the emergence of new protests.
That the overall tension is increasing is also demonstrated by the fact that, again yesterday, the director general of Rosatom, Alexey Likhachev, announced that Moscow would be ready to withdraw Russian personnel from the Iranian Bushehr nuclear power plant. All this, while Ankara itself is preparing for the possibility of a US attack against the Islamic Republic. “If the United States attacks Iran and the regime falls, Turkey is planning further measures to strengthen border security,” a Turkish official said.
It is in the midst of these fibrillations that various diplomatic maneuvers have taken place.
Axios reported that senior Israeli and Saudi officials will be in Washington to discuss the Iran crisis by the end of this week.
Moscow, for its part, is trying to calm the waters. “We continue to call on all parties to exercise restraint and refrain from resorting to force to resolve this dispute. Any coercive action would only sow chaos in the region,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Vladimir Putin also spoke about Iran yesterday in the meeting he had with the president of the Arab Emirates, Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. Furthermore, it is no mystery that, after losing a key ally like Bashar al Assad in Syria, Russia now fears seeing the Khomeini regime collapse too.
All this, while, on Wednesday, India’s Deputy National Security Advisor, Pavan Kapoor, traveled to Tehran to meet his Iranian counterpart, Ali Bagheri Kani. On the other hand, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif spoke on the phone yesterday with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. In the meantime, today Tehran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, will travel to Ankara: his objective is to leverage Turkey to avert a possible US attack. Moreover, the day before yesterday, the Turkish Foreign Minister, Hakan Fidan, had a conversation with the US ambassador to Türkiye, Tom Barrack.
In short, the increase in tension and all this diplomatic fibrillation highlight that something could happen soon. Although nothing is certain yet, it seems that Trump’s frustration with Tehran has increased in recent days. The American president, in particular, would be irritated by the lack of progress in the negotiations relating to two delicate issues: that of the nuclear program and that of the ballistic program. For this reason, it would currently be oriented towards the military option against the Islamic Republic: which would probably mean an attack either on some atomic sites or on missile manufacturing plants. From this perspective, the American president could decide to order military action precisely to put the ayatollahs with their backs against the wall, forcing them to give in to his negotiating demands. «They have every chance of reaching an agreement. They should not pursue nuclear capabilities. We will be ready to do everything this president expects of the War Department, just as we did this month in Venezuela,” Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth said last night.
But that’s not all. According to CNN, there are also targeted military actions against the leaders of the Khomeini regime on the table. And here we come to a crucial point. More than a classic regime change, Trump would be interested in adopting a Venezuelan solution with Iran: that is, decapitating the regime, and then choosing a piece of the old power system as an interlocutor, but not before having adequately tamed it. The objective would be to exert pressure to reorient Tehran’s foreign policy: exactly what the White House is doing in Caracas, in the name of so-called “coercion without property”.
This is a strategy that would allow Washington to protect national interests, while at the same time preventing the US from finding itself directly entangled in some military quagmire. Trump has, moreover, always harbored significant skepticism towards nation building processes.
Clearly, despite some parallels, the Venezuelan situation is not completely comparable to the Iranian one.
