President Hassan Rouhani and his supporters were cautiously optimistic that Joe Biden, the projected winner of the 2020 presidential election, could shift U.S. policy on Iran. “We hope the three-year experience will be a lesson for America's next administration to abide by laws and regulations and return to its commitments,” Rouhani said on November 7. In 2018, President Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal that President Barack Obama negotiated in 2015.

Iran’s annual commemoration of the U.S. embassy takeover – which became an international crisis in 1979 and made the yellow ribbon a national symbol – was cancelled due to the coronavirus. Rallies were planned in Tehran and other cities for November 3 (the takeover occurred on November 4, but Iran marks the anniversary according to the Persian calendar date, which is 13th of Aban). But by November 2, the daily count of COVID-19 deaths soared to 440, a new daily record.

On October 21, John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, accused Iran and Russia of interfering in the U.S. presidential election. “Some voter registration information has been obtained by Iran, and separately, by Russia,” he said at a hastily arranged news conference. “We have already seen Iran sending spoofed emails designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest and damage President Trump.”

By 2020, tensions between the United States and Iran increasingly played out in cyberspace. Both governments acknowledged that cyberattacks were central to their strategies, as outlined in an earlier report by The Iran Primer. The following is a timeline of specific U.S. claims of Iran cyber meddling in the U.S. presidential election.

On October 18, the global ban on the sale of conventional arms to Iran expired and opened the way for the Islamic Republic to import weapons, including warplanes and helicopter gunships, missiles, tanks, artillery and other weapon systems. The ban was imposed by U.N. Resolution 1929 in 2010. It was lifted as part of the 2015 nuclear deal – enshrined in U.N. resolution 2231 – as one of the incentives for Tehran to cooperate on its nuclear program. Iran was also allowed to export its domestically produced arms for the first time in a decade. 

The Department of Homeland Security, in its first annual risk assessment, said that the United States faced four major threats from Iran, including: cyber attacks, election interference, terrorism, and spreading disinformation on COVID-19. Iranian and North Korean cyber actors “pose a threat to U.S. systems, networks, and information” even though China and Russia are the more capable adversaries, according to the report. The following are relevant excerpts on Iran. 

Richard Nephew, author of The Art of Sanctions, is a senior research scholar at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy. He was director for Iran policy at the National Security Staff from 2011 to 2013, during the expansion of U.S. sanctions on Iran. He coordinated sanctions policy at the Department of State from 2013 to 2015, during negotiations between the six major powers and Iran that led to the 2015 nuclear deal.

Iran is lagging behind other Middle Eastern countries in expanding relations with China, according to a new study by Lucille Greer and Esfandyar Batmanghelidj. In June 2020, the “Final Draft of Iran-Strategic Partnership” circulated on Iranian social media and caused a firestorm in Iran among the general public and politicians.

September 28

Diplomacy: Iran pushed for an immediate ceasefire between Armenia and Azerbaijan after fighting erupted over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif urged his Azeri and Armenian counterparts to exercise restraint during phone calls on Sunday. 

On September 23, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz condemned Iran for spreading “chaos, extremism and sectarianism” across the Middle East and urged a “comprehensive” worldwide solution to prevent it from obtaining weapons of mass destruction. “Partial solutions and appeasement did not stop its threats to international peace and security,” he said, in his debut address to the opening of the 75th U.N. General Assembly.