The Islamic regime in Iran is on a roll. Since the Biden-Harris administration took office in January 2021, the United States stopped enforcing the Trump-era sanctions on Iranian oil exports. They paid $6 billion in exchange for the release of five dual-citizen hostages and sought to revive the failed 2015 nuclear deal. They allowed the United Nations sanctions on Iran’s missile programs to expire in October 2023, and Iran to access $10 billion in frozen assets in Iraq. Far from moderating the regime’s behavior, these US concessions have only emboldened the regime.
Since 2021, the Iranian regime has expanded its support for terrorist groups in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and the Palestinian territories, and they’ve had much more money to devote to them. At home, the regime cracked down on nationwide protests that erupted in September 2022 after the murder of a young Iranian-Kurdish woman for failing to comply with Islamic hijab rules. By the time the Biden-Harris Administration gave up its efforts to revive the nuclear deal in late 2023, the regime was flush with cash, impervious to outside pressures, and emboldened to attack US assets and US allies in the region with impunity. They thought they could do the same with Israel.
Axis of Opportunism
Further enhancing the Iranian regime’s position was the expansion of its alliances with Russia and China. Tehran signed massive long-term oil and investment deals with both powers, which solidified military and strategic ties to the point where we can now speak of a Russia-China-Iran “Axis of Opportunism.” In just three short years, the Iranian regime has gone from being virtually broke and fearful of the US Maximum Pressure campaign of President Trump, to becoming the region’s power broker. And now the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is warning that Iran has accelerated the production of highly enriched uranium to the point where it could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for “nine nuclear weapons in one month, twelve in two months, thirteen in three months… and fifteen in five months.”
This is absolutely mind-boggling.
So, how did we get here?
Carrots and Sticks
I argue in a larger piece for the America First Policy Institute that the policies of previous US administrations have failed because all of them, including the Trump Administration, were predicated on the notion that with enough carrots or enough sticks, they could convince the regime to change its behavior. But that has never happened. When the regime has been given incentives, the mullahs gobble them up and don’t even say “thank you” and continue what they were doing before. And when they do get moderately whacked through sanctions, they redirect the economy to the Revolutionary Guard so the elites make more money on the black market through corrupt business deals. Sanctions alone do not have the impact of changing the regime’s behavior.
I believe we should give up this notion of trying to change the behavior of the Iranian regime because it has utterly failed. The Iranian regime does not make policy based on a Western cost-benefit analysis. Indeed, their basic values are so completely different from ours that to change the behavior we object to would essentially be to change the regime itself. And that’s a point that goes widely unrecognized in the policy community, from left to right. When we say, “change the behavior” of the regime, the regime hears “change the regime.” And so, they utterly resist the changes we seek.
The Military Option
One caveat, however. There is one thing that from time to time has worked to alter regime behavior, and that is military pressure.
In April 1988, the Reagan Administration launched Operation Praying Mantis in response to Iran’s efforts to restrict the flow of Iraqi oil exports by mining the Strait of Hormuz. In twenty-four hours, the US Navy sank a third of Iran’s major surface ships, destroyed two offshore oil platforms and several combat aircraft, shocking regime leaders, including Ayatollah Khomeini himself. Remember, Iran had been fighting a bloody stalemate of a war with Iraq for eight years. As a result of that US military operation, Iran stopped mining the Strait of Hormuz, and less than two months later, the Ayatollah sued for peace with Saddam.
The only other time the United States exerted significant military pressure on the Tehran regime was on January 3, 2020, when President Trump ordered a drone strike in Baghdad that took out Quds Force commander, Qassim Soleimani.
Soleimani was the most significant Iranian military leader to have emerged from the Islamic Revolution. Not only was he the mastermind of Iranian terrorism and in charge of the IRGC expeditionary forces fighting in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen; he was the kingmaker of post-Saddam Iraq. He personally traveled repeatedly to Baghdad and Erbil to negotiate with Iraqi politicians the makeup of their government. He played a similar role in Lebanon.
Killing Soleimani was controversial. Most of the president’s advisors opposed it as too radical or too provocative. As Senator Lindsey Graham told author Bob Woodward, he counselled Trump against it over a round of golf at Trump International in West Palm Beach. “[T]his will be almost total war… You kill him, new game. You go from playing $10 blackjack to $10,000-a-hand blackjack… That risks major war.”
What was not talked about at the time is the fact that Soleimani traveled to Baghdad to conduct a major military operation against the United States, the storming of the US embassy. I reveal details of that planned attack, and my role in averting it, in a new book, The Iran House: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue (Post Hill Press). Iranian defectors I was running for the US intelligence community were providing real-time information on Soleimani’s operation in Baghdad, which was relayed directly to the White House.
At one point, I was asked for my recommendation. The Iranian regime respected force, I said. When the United States failed to respond to the attack that killed 241 US Marines in Beirut in October 1983, Iran took that as a sign of US weakness. Ronald Reagan cured them of that notion with Operation Praying Mantis. We needed to do the same thing today and hit them hard, not sucker-punch them, I said. Two days later, a drone killed Qassem Soleimani.
After four years of Biden-Harris appeasement, restraining the regime’s aggressive behavior will be more complicated than ever. Not only are they wealthier than they were when Team Biden took over in January 2021, they have now cemented a new economic, strategic, and military alliance with Russia and China. That increases the stakes of a US-Iranian confrontation significantly.
The Nuclear Equation
And there is now the nuclear equation. We finally have a secretary general of the IAEA, Raphael Grossi, who takes Iran’s violations of its commitments under the Treaty for the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons seriously. This is refreshing. But without backup from the United States, Grossi’s admonitions have had zero impact on regime behavior or the West’s perception of a threat from Tehran.
Donald Rumsfeld liked to talk about “known unknowns.” We know that we don’t know whether Iran has a nuclear weapon, and we know that in part because of the IAEA inspections. We know also that we don’t know whether Iran has an undeclared uranium enrichment plant, or a secret bomb plant. But both are possible. We are also pretty sure that if they have a warhead they have not mated it to a missile or transported it outside of Iran. But we still don’t know what we don’t know.
However, what we do know is quite a lot.
While Iran has not – as of this writing – conducted a nuclear weapons test, the IAEA has told us repeatedly that they have tested all the non-nuclear components of a nuclear warhead. This is extremely significant because these components are not simple technologies. They include neutron initiators that must time the detonation of the non-nuclear core of the weapon in a precise sequence measured in micro-seconds.
We also know that they have a workable nuclear weapons design thanks to the revelations of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Israel’s Mossad pulled off what I believe is the most astonishing intelligence operation since World War II. Remember, an Israeli team infiltrated Tehran in 2018, located the nondescript warehouse in a working class neighborhood where Iran’s nuclear archive was housed, and broke into four gigantic safes. They seized five hundred boxes of documents and CDs, including documents that chronicled the development and testing of non-nuclear warhead components and the warhead design. The Mossad operatives then exfiltrated the archive in panel trucks and got out of dodge before anyone woke up, and all of it within a six-hour time window.
So, we know that they have a weapon design. We know they have the highly-enriched uranium. We know that they have rockets that are capable of carrying a weapon, should they decide to put it on a rocket, which I’m not entirely convinced they would because of missile defense capabilities in Israel and elsewhere.
The Biggest Unknown
The biggest unknown is what’s in Ayatollah Khamenei’s mind. We have been told – falsely – by pro-regime advocates that many years ago he issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons. (Without burdening readers with pages of footnotes, I say “falsely” for one simple, self-evident reason: the nuclear weapons development teams whose documents were seized by Mossad could not have carried out their work and spent the enormous sums they spent without the Ayatollah’s blessing).
But we do know what the regime says about its intention, which is to eliminate both Israel and the United States. We should take them seriously. We appease this regime at our peril.
To date, only force has had any impact on changing the behavior of the regime. But before anyone leap to the conclusion that I favor a massive military strike on Iran, let me make clear that I have long advocated a very different alternative, and that is enacting policies that enable the people of Iran to overthrow the regime without a US bullet being fired or a US boot on the ground.
I will expand on those policies in the next issue of inFOCUS Quarterly.
Ken Timmerman is a senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute, whose 14th work of non-fiction, The Iran House: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue, was just released by Post Hill Press. This article has been adapted from a longer policy piece commissioned by AFPI.
