After the Ayatollahs

By Shay Khatiri

Thursday, June 13, 2024

 

As instability in the Middle East rises, everything points to Tehran as its fundamental source. Though American leaders might not have agreed on a solution, they seem finally to agree, after 45 years, on the problem: that the Islamic Republic is neither capable of reform nor interested in preserving regional order. The only permanent solution, therefore, is regime change.

 

For most of the Islamic Republic’s life, there was hope in the free world that the regime was in a rebellious adolescent phase. Eventually, it would grow out of it and become normal. Henry Kissinger commented that “Iran needs to decide whether it wished to be a nation or a cause.”

 

The election of Mohammad Khatami to the Iranian presidency in 1997 offered the first glimmer of hope for reform. Whether Khatami was a sincere reformist is debatable, but his public statements encouraged President Bill Clinton to try to force a friendly encounter with him in the halls of the United Nations in 1998. Khatami understood that to respond with hostility would undermine his foreign-policy objectives, while friendly reciprocation would be political suicide at home. As the legend goes, he hid in a restroom until Clinton gave up. This story is a good metaphor for U.S.–Iranian relations of the era. American leaders often sought to be on better terms, but their attempts were never reciprocated.

 

The administration of George W. Bush at first maintained the usual policy of exerting some economic pressure while engaging in minimal diplomacy. As Iran’s nuclear program progressed, the sanctions mounted. President Barack Obama began his presidency by promising Iran’s leaders that if they were “willing to unclench their fist,” they would “find an extended hand from us.” He continued to increase sanctions, avoided military confrontation (warranted though it might have been given Iran’s meddling in Iraq and crimes against humanity in Syria), and engaged Iran diplomatically. Eventually, the two sides celebrated a nuclear agreement that exchanged the lifting of sanctions for the Islamic Republic’s commitment not to enrich uranium past certain limits. The nations’ two presidents even made history by talking over the phone briefly. The Islamic Republic seemed to be entering maturity.

 

It was not. As if to compensate for the constraints it was accepting in the nuclear deal, the Islamist regime became even more aggressive regionally through its proxy militias, satellites, and conventional military. Its forces deployed to Syria and Iraq, undermining American policy even as it conducted nuclear diplomacy with the United States. Hezbollah captured Lebanon’s political system. As civil war broke out in Yemen, Iran backed the Shiite Islamist Houthis and began shipping them arms.

 

The Islamic Republic’s increased aggression after the 2015 agreement did much to convince all factions of the U.S. political establishment that to expect moderation in Iran’s foreign policy was folly. Inside Iran, oppression was peaking, and unrest was becoming more common. In a 2016 Atlantic profile, Obama even asserted that improved relations with Iran had never been an objective of his.

 

The administration of Donald Trump had a strategy of containing the Islamic Republic financially through sanctions. The current administration has continued a sanctions-and-diplomacy approach with a smaller stick and more carrot. Nonetheless, President Joe Biden, like his predecessor, has expressed no illusions that better relations are possible. His administration has been very reluctant to confront the Islamic Republic directly but has also been much more willing than its predecessors to attack Iran’s proxies.

 

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American policy on Iran has quietly undergone a radical intellectual transformation, and the Islamic Republic deserves all the credit. For decades, virtually all Democrats and most Republicans believed that the Islamic Republic was reformable. Most of them have since changed their minds because the adversary remains dedicated to its ways at home and abroad. Recent news confirms this paradigm shift. In April, after Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash, most observers on the left and the right rushed to insist that his death would change nothing about Iran’s foreign policy or domestic conduct.

 

Now there is a new debate: Should the United States actively seek regime change, or should it contain the regional problems that the Islamic Republic causes, in the hope that the Iranian people will topple it themselves? It would be a mistake to again ignore the few conservatives who have been right all along that the regime isn’t reformable and who are now warning about the impracticalities of containment.

 

The United States can to some degree contain Iran, but doing so is at odds with the desire for a democratic revolution. Containment requires diplomacy, and diplomacy too often entails sanctions relief. Sanctions relief in turn rescues the regime financially and enables it to undermine U.S. interests abroad and put down rebellions at home.

 

America is sleepwalking into an Iranian civil war. The regime still has a monopoly on violence, feels no shame in pacifying Iranians by terrorizing them, and is absolutely committed to maintaining its rule, which it believes to be the will of God. Many Iranians, on the other hand, have shown that they are not easily pacified. The first round of anti-regime protests in the regime’s history happened in 2017. Each wave since has been bigger, stronger, and bloodier. Divisions between the regime and the majority of the people are too deep for peaceful reconciliation. As the security forces’ rank and file become more sympathetic to the people’s cause, a civil war becomes likelier. By hoping that Iranians take care of the problem themselves, however, the United States is leaving too much to chance.

 

The Iranian people do make the task of regime change easier. Regime change is now associated with the Iraq War, but in this case it would be an indigenous initiative encouraged and supported from outside. The ideal U.S. policy would be threefold: First, the United States would work with the Iranian diaspora to establish contacts with dissidents in the country and give them material support; second, it would communicate to the Islamic Republic’s leaders that the policy of regime change will not go away with a change of administration; third, it would make clear that, should the Islamic Republic’s leaders turn Iran into another Syria by waging war against an internal revolution, America would ensure that the people come out on top and would decline to rescue toppled leaders and their families. Should they decide to abdicate, however, the United States would make necessary accommodations to protect them.

 

Working with the Iranian diaspora to establish contacts inside Iran would convince the Islamic Republic that the United States was serious about regime change. It would also involve a couple of difficulties.

 

First, political divisions and deep suspicions in the diaspora, whose members often fear that their compatriots are in the pocket of the regime, make it difficult to work with. The suspicions are not paranoid. It’s unproven, but the regime likely has agents in the United States who attend anti–Islamic Republic meetings to disrupt them.

 

And second, the Department of State has been reluctant to choose a favorite among the many factions of the Iranian opposition. Worse, former and current officials too often appear at events hosted by the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, a cultish and fringe anti-regime group with a sizeable treasury that it uses to buy influence in Washington. The Islamic Republic widely publicizes these appearances to convince Iranians that regime change would lead to a Mojahedin government, which would be even less popular than the Islamic Republic because of the group’s history of terrorist attacks inside Iran, its Marxist-Islamist ideology, and its fighting alongside Saddam Hussein’s military during the Iran–Iraq War. Simply put, picking winners and losers is necessary for a successful regime-change policy, but the U.S. government refuses to do it and even gives tacit support to the wrong group.

 

To remedy this situation, the government should pick a single Iranian-opposition figure and organization to work with. In finding that person, it should prioritize competence over ideology, so long as the ideology broadly reflects the politics of the Iranian people. It should also task the FBI with investigating potential Islamic Republic agents on U.S. soil.

 

Providing material help to the Iranian people would be a tall order. The U.S. government has never had a policy of regime change in Iran; hence it hasn’t developed the necessary mechanisms to provide support. The most important step would be to establish a covert presence in the country, with American spies seeking to manipulate court politics. There are a few examples of known senior-leadership defections (most recently, a former deputy minister of defense who was discovered and executed). Facilitating such defections would enable the United States to better understand and influence the internal workings of the Islamic Republic.

 

A second obvious use for U.S. intelligence assets in Iran, advocated by American Enterprise Institute senior fellow and former Pentagon official Michael Rubin, would be to distribute strike funds to Iranian workers, an idea that diaspora leaders have embraced. Rubin has also proposed that the U.S. put a hospital ship in the Persian Gulf — Iranians commonly travel to Dubai — to treat Iranian war veterans, many of them members of the Islamic Revolution’s Guardians Corps (usually translated as “Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps”), and cultivate intelligence-gathering relationships with them.

 

There is a suboptimal alternative to deploying American spies in Iran. Unlike the United States, the Mossad has penetrated deep into the regime’s security institutions, though it has few of its own nationals inside the country. Instead, it often flies Iranian dissidents to third countries, provides them with training and resources, and then sends them back. While it would not be as good as having American agents on the ground, collaborating with the Mossad on these activities would be better than doing nothing.

 

Economic pressure on the Islamic Republic remains a major tool of influence. Leaked documents show that the leadership worried greatly about the poverty of its rank-and-file security forces, which had caused internal dissent. Since then, the Islamic Republic has stabilized the situation, a task made easier by sanctions relief from the Biden administration. The United States should revert to using economic pressure to create more dissidents.

 

There are other means that the U.S. government should develop to help Iranians. In particular, it should ensure reliable digital communications with dissidents in order to provide them with intelligence and training. The internet in Iran is heavily censored and could soon devolve into an intranet, a closed national network. The United States must ensure that Iranians do not lose access to the global internet, either by smuggling in satellite modems or by threatening the regime’s core interests to prevent it from cutting off public access to the internet. The Biden administration failed embarrassingly to smuggle Starlink modems into the country during the protests of 2022–23; Iran’s population is 90 million, but the U.S. managed to set up only about 100 modems connected to Starlink satellites. It must not make that mistake again.

 

The intelligence community and the Department of State could also investigate and disclose Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s assets, whose value is estimated to be around $200 billion, to embarrass the leadership, demoralize its base, and prompt boycotts of the regime’s businesses inside Iran.

 

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The need for the U.S. to develop a new, comprehensive Iran policy is time-sensitive: Khamenei, who is 85, recently had a health scare and is rumored to have cancer. The character of a post-Khamenei Iran is no longer an intellectual debate but rather an immediate policy question. Although the U.S. government has many assessments of his potential successors, it has seemingly no plan to take advantage of the power vacuum that his death will leave. Raisi was the primary candidate for Khamenei’s position. His demise leaves Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, as the main alternative, but the Islamic Republic was born out of opposition to hereditary rule. The younger Khamenei’s bid to inherit the position would create internal objections and prolong the process of his father’s replacement. Ideally, an extended power vacuum would lead to the collapse of the regime. The formation of a leadership council and the abolition of the unitary position of supreme leader should also be welcomed. This could lead to factional divisions, and the United States should prepare itself to exploit them.

 

Decades of U.S. funding of nongovernmental organizations in the Iranian diaspora, along with the work of government subsidiaries such as Voice of America, Radio Farda (the Farsi branch of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty), and the National Endowment for Democracy, have achieved their limited objective: liberalizing the attitudes of a significant portion of the Iranian people. Now Americans must recognize that liberal hearts and minds cannot win by standing athwart bullets.

 

In 2022, protests erupted in Iran in response to the killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by the state’s religious-morality police. The protesters adopted a curious slogan: “Woman, Life, Liberty.” Two-thirds of it can be traced to the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the philosophy of John Locke. The protesting Iranians were sending a clear signal of their Americanized, liberal values; they communicated their wish to reject the ways of their oppressors and align themselves with the ideals — and interests — of free nations. It is now left to Americans to act in their own interest and heed the call.