Iran’s clerical leadership, under “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali HoseiniKhamene‘i, is expected to make rapid, significant, and symbolic responses to the targeted killing in Baghdad on January 3, 2019, of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force commander Maj.-Gen. Qasem Soleimani.
It seems unlikely that the Iranian response would initially be to launch a military assault on Israel, which it has been planning, but, rather, something which could target the oil production and exports of the US’ key allies in the region: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, in particular (but not exclusively). The event was not only decisive for the US-Iranian dynamic, but it will also have long-term structural effects on the supply of oil and gas.
This will particularly impact (negatively) the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and, positively in the short-term, Russia. This comes at a time when the PRC economy is already suffering severe degradation, so the net effect of a significant rise in oil prices would be to accelerate the PRC recession, which would, in turn, significantly impact the global economy as 2020 progressed.
This could, then, have an impact on the US November 2020 Presidential and Congressional elections, although the decline in the PRC economy was always going to have an impact on the US during the year in any event. The pivotal event of the killing of Soleimani seems likely, therefore, to ensure that the US and the PRC will now work to cement a trade resolution as quickly as possible.
Certainly, in the short-term, there is likely to be a significant uptick in the ongoing Iranian-directed attacks by Shi’a militia units against US military facilities in Iraq, as well as the mobilization of terrorist and subversive actions against US bases and facilities in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere.
It is increasingly evident that the Iranian clerical leadership under the ailing Ayatollah Khamene‘i had, until the shock of the decisive US attack which killed Soleimani and several other key officials, completely misread the resolve and intent of its two major nemeses, the US and Israel, and had been preparing to act on those faulty perceptions.
Misreadings of the situation have contributed to the belief within the Khamene‘i circle that it was now possible to militarily confront and destroy Israel, as Yossef Bodansky described in a report on October 21, 2019. Some Iranian clerical leaders have stated that it was also possible to see the removal of the US from the Persian Gulf and wider Middle Eastern region, even as a precursor to minimizing the engagement in the region of Russia, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and current Iranian ally Turkey.
“Supreme Leader” Khamene‘i, supported by key leadership elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC: Pasdaran) has, since around mid-2019, been increasingly contemplating some form of unprecedented foreign adventurism, based on a misreading of the regional and global strategic situation, as a means of compensating for a declining internal security situation. Perceptions of Iranian military successes in Yemen, which were, in reality, failures of the Saudi-led coalition fighting there, created in Tehran the belief that Iranian forces could sweep all before them.
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