What is happening in Iran is a revolution, not a protest movement. If the Iranian people overthrow the theocratic regime that has ruled their country since 1979, their achievement will be the single most significant event in the Middle East in generations.
Consider the stakes. The ayatollahs’ regime is the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism. The regime funds, arms, trains, and directs terrorist organizations and cells in nearly every country in the world. Iran apparently passed the nuclear threshold this year, which means the ayatollahs are now capable of developing nuclear weapons at will. Iran has an advanced ballistic missile industry and fields missiles capable of hitting targets in most of Europe. As Russia’s deployment of Iranian-supplied attack drones in Ukraine demonstrates, Iran also functions as a lead arsenal for anti-Western autocracies.
Iran is one of the main reasons the U.S. lost its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran supported and assisted the Taliban and al-Qaeda from the outset of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. Iran also organized, armed, and directed both the Sunni and Shiite insurgencies in Iraq.
Through terror proxies in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, the Palestinian territories, and beyond, Iran is behind almost every war and ongoing military conflict in the Middle East. Iran also targets the U.S. via allied governments and terror cells all throughout Latin America.
The Iranian regime has mortgaged its future to China, empowering China to push its weight around in a manner that threatens the United States’ core interests in the Middle East. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, Iran has facilitated Russia’s evasion of Western economic sanctions.
If the Iranian regime survives the current revolution, with or without the Biden administration’s nefarious nuclear deal, Tehran will either become a nuclear-armed state in the next year or so, or there will be a major Middle Eastern war—or both. The economic and strategic costs of such a war would be devastating for both the region and the West.
On the other hand, if the revolution is successful, Iran will become a different place. The sort of Iran that will arise over time is unknowable. But a few things are clear. The revolutionaries act under the banners of women’s rights, ethnic minority rights, and above all, freedom and democracy. The revolutionaries reject what Masih Alinejad, a leader of Iran’s revolutionary movement, has referred to as the three ideological pillars of the regime: institutional misogyny, hatred of the U.S., and hatred of Israel.
So at a minimum, we can expect that a free Iran will end the Khomeinist regime’s support for international terrorist organizations, and that it will not threaten to annihilate its neighbors with nuclear weapons. It will not view itself as at war with the United States. Twenty-one years after the 9/11 attacks, the head of the global terror snake, so to speak, will have been cut off.
The stake we all have in the revolution’s success is, therefore, obvious.
Iranian lobbyists and their aligned media are insisting that the current revolution in Iran is merely a protest movement like the others we have seen over the years. The people in the Iranian street, they say, are merely interested in governmental reform.
This is a lie.
The people right now on the streets of Iran’s cities, from one end of the country to the other and in every ethnic province, are calling for the regime’s overthrow. They are not simply calling for an easing of restrictions on women’s freedom, or cultural autonomy for Iran’s ethnic minorities. They are not simply demanding the payment of pensions, or better working conditions and pay. They demand a new, democratic, human rights-respecting regime.
There is no way to know whether this revolution will succeed or fail. History has seen far more revolutions fail than succeed. But given the stakes, it is equally obvious that the only reasonable policy at this time is for all of us, from all sides of the political and ideological spectrum, to put our full support behind the revolutionaries. Such a policy would involve, among other things, expelling all Iranian diplomats from their posts worldwide; placing personal sanctions on all regime leaders; ending—rather than postponing or conditioning the continuation of—the current U.S.-led nuclear negotiations, which, if successful, will have little influence on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, but will serve to enrich the regime with hundreds of billions of dollars; providing safe and open internet connections to the Iranian people; and providing whatever materiel is necessary to the revolutionaries to facilitate their efforts.
Additionally, operations against Iran’s nuclear installations would both serve as an expression of support for the revolutionaries, and delay or eliminate one of the gravest strategic threats posed by the Iranian regime to the world.
Distressingly, rather than take these actions, the Biden administration speaks out of both sides of its mouth. Last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with regime opponents and lobbyists in the same meeting at the State Department, and referred to both as civil society representatives. Due to this moral and diplomatic equivalence, the move was a transparent signal to the regime that the Biden administration is not supporting the revolutionaries. It was also a means to legitimize the regime’s supporters.
Wearing State Department-minted badges of legitimacy, these Iranian regime lobbyists and supporters in turn have briefed friendly reporters with claims that the administration must not sanction the regime, because it will only harm the protesters. According to the lobbyists, the Biden administration should also maintain its policy of realigning U.S. Middle East policy toward the Iranian regime through its nuclear appeasement and lifting of sanctions, because diplomacy is the only answer.
The Biden administration is maintaining its policy of supporting the Iranian regime, even as the mullahs’ security forces murder, torture, and terrorize the Iranian people, because the administration is so blinded by its zealous anti-colonialist ideology that it cannot see or understand what is actually happening. Like the Obama administration before it, the Biden administration subscribes to a Manichaean, anti-colonialist worldview that believes anti-Western revolutionary regimes like the Iranian regime are authentic representations of righteous hatred of the West.
Former President Barack Obama, President Joe Biden, their Iran envoy Robert Malley, Blinken, and their advisors and aides cannot understand that the oppressed people of Iran can be free of hatred of the West and even seek friendship and cooperation with the likes of Israel and the United States. As Obama explained last week, he refused to support Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution because he feared that U.S. support for the revolutionaries would discredit them. Obama—like Biden today—could not countenance the notion that the Iranian people themselves do not hate America. An oversimplified anti-colonialist ideology doesn’t allow for the possibility that a more nuanced state of affairs can exist.
The anti-colonialist creed of the Biden administration and its progressive supporters dictates that the only possible policy for dealing with “legitimate” regimes, such as the Iranian regime, is to appease them through payouts and strategic concessions. The nuclear deal, which does both of these things, is a perfect expression of the anti-colonialist foreign policy.
Under the circumstances, Congress and the American public should stand with the Iranian revolutionaries and demand that the Biden administration see the truth. For the first time since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, we have a real chance of seeing this toxic regime fall. Every possible effort must be made to help make this possibility a reality.