Don’t forget Iran!

The pace and range of U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign-policy initiatives are simply dizzying.

In keeping with Trump’s keen sense of drama, honed through his years spent in television, observers of his decisions can pivot from elation to fear and from the heights of hope to the depths of despair, all in a single 24-hour period. From Venezuela to Greenland to Syria and beyond, the Trumpian juggernaut has, in quick succession, ploughed through the norms and conventions that have governed international security for the last 80 years. And it’s only January.

Yet none of the developments of the last few weeks, as vitally important as they are, approach the historic significance of the protests in Iran. If it wasn’t already clear from the protests of 2019 and 2022-23, as well as the previous waves stretching back more than a decade, there is no room for doubt now on two matters.

First, the large majority of Iranians want to overthrow the Islamic Republic, not reform it. Second, the Islamic Republic will show no restraint in the brutality of its response. The killings so far of thousands of protesters attest to that. According to the London-based The Times, medical staff on the ground say that “at least 16,500 protesters have died and 330,000 have been injured, most of them in two days of utter slaughter in the most brutal crackdown by the clerical regime in its 47-year existence.”

For more than a week, it appeared that the United States would follow through on Trump’s pledge to aid the protests through a combination of kinetic attacks on the regime’s repressive infrastructure, along with non-kinetic measures such as cyberattacks, restoring access to the internet after the regime closed it down and a new layer of sanctions.

But as is often the case when Trump issues threats, an exit strategy for the Iranian regime was embedded in his tough talk. After he declared himself satisfied that the ruling mullahs were not going to execute some of the detained protesters, he abruptly pulled away from further intervention. The jury is still out on whether Trump actually backed down or whether this was a temporary shift in his tactics. As of this writing, the U.S. Navy’s Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group is wending its way toward the Middle East, suggesting that the dark clouds hanging over the Iranian regime have not lifted.

That regime is weaker than at any point since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The combined effects of heavy sanctions and the extensive Israeli airstrikes last June, joined by the United States in their final days, have left the ruling ayatollahs paranoid about internal security. As the value of the Iranian rial continues to decline, with a corresponding rise in the prices of foodstuffs and other basic goods, the regime is unquestionably teetering. But if the Islamic Republic is to end up in the trash dustbin of history, it still needs one firm push over the edge.

At the global level, the end of the regime would signal a welcome setback for its backers in Russia and China, as well as its anti-Western allies around the world, from Colombia to South Africa.

At the regional level, the regime’s demise would be a further blow to its terrorist proxies from which they might never recover.

And at the local level, the defeat of Iran’s apparatus of repression—rooted in the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—would allow Iranians to inhale the scent of freedom after nearly 50 years of theocratic dictatorship. The desire for freedom has manifested across all 31 provinces of Iran, confirming that this is truly a national movement for regime change.

As is invariably the case with sudden—in this case, revolutionary—change, it would be naive to expect smooth, linear progress in the aftermath of the regime’s demise. To begin with, there is no obvious, organised opposition waiting to take the reins of power. The stock of Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed Shah, has risen against the background of the protests, with many of those in the streets chanting his name and waving the pre-Islamic Republic Iranian flag. But the return of the monarchy cannot be said, at this stage, to be a consensus position among Iranians agitating against the regime.

Nor would the regime’s removal end the threat of radical Islamism in the Middle East. As Iran’s power has plummeted, Turkey’s has soared. Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is arguably the main threat to Israel in the region, though his current focus is nearer home, as he supports the brutal offensive led by Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa’s forces into areas held by the Kurdish allies of the United States. And, unlike Iran, Turkey is still regarded as a component of the Western alliance, despite Erdoğan’s neo-Ottoman foreign policy.

Neither of these considerations is justification for the continued survival of the ayatollahs. Were they to do so, their focus would be exclusively on rebuilding their capabilities. If they are still in power a year from now, it is reasonable to expect that a major effort to reconstitute the nuclear facilities badly damaged in last June’s war would be underway, with precious little oversight from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), frequently denounced in Iranian official media as an agent of Israeli interests.

A similar effort would be mounted with regard to Iran’s ballistic-missile arsenal, which last year proved its ability to strike inside Israel on more than one occasion. That could lead to a situation, as was the case last June, in which Israel is forced to again strike Iran, but at a time when an exhausted protest movement is unable to mobilise in the way that it has done this past month.

There is truly a historic opportunity here. If we give the regime yet another chance—and if the United States is again entrapped in negotiations that serve only to buy the ayatollahs more time—then we will squander it. Above all, we will send a message to the Iranian people that their lives are mere bargaining chips, despite all our noble rhetoric, and that they are on their own.