Washington Prepares to Tighten Sanctions on Iran

Washington is gearing up to tighten sanctions on Iran, again, at the same time as new revelations emerge indicating that Iran was caught unaware when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. 

Iran has sent a message through Western media via anonymous sources speaking to Reuters. Iranian and Hamas sources said that Iran’s supreme leader chastised Hamas in early November for failing to warn Tehran of the pending attack, and told Hamas that Iran would not be stepping in on Hamas’ behalf, with anything other than political and moral support. 

Even that was with conditions, with the same sources telling Reuters that the Supreme Leader advised the Hamas leader to “silence” those calling for Iran and Hezbollah to jump into a full-blown war with Israel. 

Tehran’s goal here is to obfuscate. It sends anonymous sources to the Western media to spread one message, and then officially refutes it to appease its allies and to create further polarization in the U.S.

On the Gaza battlefield, Hamas is pursuing a strategy of delaying tactics rather than defense, designed to buy time by giving up some space, and then ultimately the goal would be to regroup during that time to launch another urban guerilla warfare offensive (ISW). 

In terms of Iran and the U.S., the proxy war is very obviously taking place in Syria, where the U.S. last weekend targeted Iran-affiliated facilities in response to what the U.S. says have been over 50 attacks on its position in Syria and Iraq.

The most likely near-term repercussion of the Hamas-Israel conflict will be a significant resurgence of fighting in Syria, from which Iraq is desperately hoping to insulate itself. While exchanges of fire on the Israel-Lebanon border will continue, the message (even circulating among Israeli media) is that this isn’t Hezbollah’s war and Hezbollah has no desire to drag Lebanon into it.

And as we have noted previously, Yemen’s Houthis have an agenda that is not about Israel at all, for them it is about derailing the Iran-Saudi detente. 

For oil prices, it means nothing for the time being, following the temporary rally immediately after the Hamas attack on Israel. A likely scenario is that this stays in the realm of proxy warfare on multiple fronts, with Iran obfuscating in order to gain leverage against the West, rather than a full-blown regional conflict that threatens major Middle East oil installations. The only way there would be a sustained oil price rally based on geopolitical developments would be if Saudi or UAE oil was directly threatened. Even then, it would have to be threatened much more gravely than it was in 2019.