Both Republican and Democrat administrations have consistently sought to change the behavior of the Islamic regime in Tehran.
As I recounted in the Fall 2024 issue of inFOCUS Quarterly, Democrat administrations have sought accommodation with the regime, while Republicans tended to apply pressure through sanctions.
Neither approach has been met with much success for one simple reason: the type of behavior we have sought to change amounts to the core values of the regime itself.
These include the system of the Velayat-e faghih, or absolute clerical rule, and the export of the Islamic revolution. Both concepts are enshrined in the constitution of the Islamic Republic.
I believe it’s time we recognized that our problem with Iran is the regime itself.
As long as this regime exists it will continue to pursue its core objectives of destroying America and the freedoms America represents, and destroying Israel, which the regime sees as an eschatological duty enshrined in the Quran.
Because Islamic Iran is an ideological regime, not one based on power or territory or national identity, it will not respond to the levers of power politics. This is what differentiates it from the challenges President Trump will face from Russia, Communist China, and North Korea.
The leaders of those countries will respond to some blend of negotiation, coercion, and enticement to set aside – at least temporarily – their hostile intent toward America. In other words, they are ripe for the Art of the Deal.
Islamic Iran is not.
Any notion that the mullahs in Tehran are ready to make a deal with President Trump is profoundly mistaken. They do not chant “Death to America” at every public meeting just for the cameras. They believe that their regime will utterly destroy the United States, and they are planning each day how they can accomplish that end. And the deals they do make – such as the 2015 nuclear agreement – all contribute to that end.
During the 2024 campaign, President Trump promised to reimpose the maximum pressure sanctions on the Iranian regime. The goal was to dramatically reduce the amount of hard currency available to the regime to build missiles and drones, expand its nuclear weapons infrastructure, and support murderous groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
In response to a congressional mandate passed in April 2024, the US Energy Information Agency in November issued its first public estimate of Iran’s oil revenue. It found that Iran earned $144 billion from oil exports during the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration, and $34 billion during the first nine months of 2024. This compares to just $16 billion in 2020 under Trump, when the maximum pressure sanctions were being enforced.
Iran’s oil exports rose from 400,000 barrels/day in 2020, to well over 2.5 million b/d in 2024, because the Biden-Harris White House ordered the federal government to stop enforcing US sanctions laws.
But cutting off Iran’s oil revenues is not enough. As I argue in a much longer paper for the America First Policy Institute, we should couple maximum pressure on the regime with Maximum Support for the Iranian people.
It is in America’s national security interest to help the people of Iran to replace the Islamic regime – not through a replay of old Neocon fantasies of imposing “regime change” from the outside through groups like the MEK – but by enabling the Iranian people to take those steps themselves.
What the US Can Do
First, we can delegitimize the Iranian regime and its representatives by banning them from overseas travel, including to the UN in New York. We should expel them from international organizations and block their ability to cash in on their stolen wealth in Western banks.
Second, we can promote pro-freedom Iranian voices on US government-sponsored international media, including the Voice of America’s Persian language service. Today, VOA is considered the “voice of the mullahs” by many inside Iran.
Third, President Trump should appoint a Special Ambassador to the People of Iran to help the pro-freedom movement in its decades-long effort to coalesce into a force capable of taking on the regime through non violent struggle. The Special Ambassador should meet with Iranian opposition leaders in Washington and elsewhere and promote their efforts on the world stage.
The US can also provide secure chat apps and other technology to allow opposition protesters to communicate securely amongst themselves without fear of government eavesdropping, and with the outside world when the regime shuts down the Internet.
Lessons from the Past
The Iranian regime has suffered only two major military defeats in its 45-year history, defeats big enough that they destroyed – at least for a time – the regime’s will to fight.
One was in Lebanon, where Israel devastated Hezbollah’s military infrastructure and command structure.
Hezbollah remains an Iranian proxy, and several other factors beyond Israeli military pressure caused the Iranian regime to throw in the towel and agree to a ceasefire in November 2024. First, was fear of the incoming Trump administration. Second, was the wrath of the Lebanese people, fed up with the destruction of their national infrastructure because of Hezbollah’s war against Israel.
The last thing Iranian regime leaders wanted was to directly suffer the consequences of a proxy’s defeat. They had fought Israel to the blood of the last Lebanese until the Lebanese themselves revolted.
Iran’s other major military defeat, at the hands of Saddam Hussein in 1988, offers lessons for today.
It began with the devastating chemical weapons attack on the Iraqi Kurdish city of Halabja on March 17-18, 1988, to punish the city for having temporarily fallen into Iranian hands. Chemical weapons had been used off and on by both sides during the 1980-1988 war, but never with the intensity of the Iraqi assault on Halabja. The Iranians sent a Revolutionary Guards video crew to film the aftermath, and those images lived on to haunt not just the Iraqi Kurdish survivors but Iranian television viewers and regime leaders.
One month later, the United States Navy conducted a 24-hour campaign that knocked out one-third of Iran’s surface warships and several oil export platforms. Operation Praying Mantis came in retaliation for Iran’s mining of the Strait of Hormuz, and it convinced Ayatollah Khomeini that the United States had joined Saddam Hussein in his eight-year-long war effort.
While that battle was taking place at sea, Saddam Hussein’s forces, under the command of Lieutenant General Maher Rashid, loaded the 200 tanks of an entire armored division onto West German tank transporters and shifted them from al Amarah, where the Iranians were expecting an attack, to the Fao Peninsula, some 170 miles to the south, all in a single night.
Ayatollah Khomeini had been prepared to fight a long hard slog against Saddam Hussein, but he wasn’t prepared to fight the United States alongside an Iraqi army aided by US technology and satellite intelligence. Two months later, he threw in the towel.
The Axis of Opportunism
Iran’s leaders have worked hard in recent years to prevent a similar situation from developing by forging new alliances with two powerful protectors: Russia and Communist China. They want great power guardians to shield them from the United States and Israel, just as Saddam Hussein shielded himself with the United States.
Once President Joe Biden took office, the Iranian regime signed massive partnership agreements with China and Russia, agreements so vast in scope they changed the strategic equation in the region in short order.
China
For China, the deals were all about securing future oil supplies. For Russia, they were the culmination of a three-century pursuit of reaching the warm seas through the Persian Gulf. The Biden Administration’s lack of response to these moves and its hostility toward key US ally (and Iran rival) Saudi Arabia emboldened Russia, China, and Iran to create what I have called an Axis of Opportunism.
The Chinese were the first to formalize the new arrangements, which they called a “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership,” on March 27, 2021. The agreement committed Iran as a partner in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a multi trillion-dollar scheme to expand Chinese influence from Asia to Europe.
Under the agreement, China pledged to invest in transportation and agriculture projects in Iran and to build a new military port just outside the Strait of Hormuz at Chahbahar that could host a permanent Chinese military contingent. This is the first time since the 1906 Constitutional Revolution that Iran has allowed a foreign power to establish a permanent military base on its territory.
In exchange, Iran guaranteed long-term oil supplies at preferential prices to China. The deal, as announced, spanned 25 years and was worth an estimated $400 billion.
Russia
In October 2021, it was Russia’s turn to announce a new strategic partnership with Iran, which they called the Global Agreement for Cooperation. The deal included formal membership for Iran in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and a free-trade zone linking China, Russia, former Soviet Central Asian republics, and others in the region.
Military, Diplomatic and Trade Alignment
In January 2022, the three countries held joint naval exercises in the Gulf of Oman and the northern Indian Ocean, which Tehran called “Maritime Security Belt 2022.” The three navies conducted another set of joint drills in the region in March 2023, just as Putin was expanding ties with China and Iran, and yet another in March 2024. They also conducted naval exercises off the coast of South Africa with the South African Navy.
Putin visited Iran in July 2022 on his first trip outside Russia since the invasion of Ukraine. While he was there, Iran’s national oil company signed a $40 billion agreement with Russia’s state-run Gazprom that included Russian investment to develop Iranian gas fields and the construction of new gas export pipelines.
In May 2023, Russia and Iran signed a $1.7 billion railway agreement that the two countries boasted would rival the Suez Canal as a global trade route. The deal included financing of a long-planned, 162 kilometer-long Rasht-Astara rail line along the Caspian Sea linking Russian Black Sea ports to Iranian ports on the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Oman. It was the last link in the chain that would accomplish Russia’s centuries-long struggle to establish a secure transportation corridor to the warm seas.
The agreements also had a diplomatic component, which took many by surprise. Following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, Russia and China repeatedly supported Iran and Hamas at the UN Security Council, introducing multiple ceasefire resolutions aimed at curtailing Israel’s efforts to dismantle the Hamas terror infrastructure, and on April 19, 2024, to recognize a Palestinian state. In March 2024, Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen agreed to exempt Russian and Chinese ships from drone and missile attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea.
Also, in March 2024, Iran and Russia signed 19 separate agreements aimed at cementing their efforts to build a massive natural gas cartel along with Qatar. Iran, Russia and Qatar now control 60 percent of the world’s natural gas reserves.
Taken together, Russia, China, and Iran are in the process of building an energy/transportation powerhouse that will dominate the Persian Gulf region for decades to come, and all of it without a single countering move by the Biden Administration.
Decouple Iran from Russia and China
The United States can increase pressure on the Islamic regime by bolstering its Maximum Pressure-Maximum Support campaign with efforts to decouple Iran from its new allies in Russia and China.
Just as the first Trump Administration shut down supplies to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in 2019, Trump 47 should sanction suppliers to the proposed Russian and Chinese oil and gas projects with Iran, including equipment needed to build new LNG terminals.
Natural gas injection is another key chokepoint, as many of Iran’s onshore oil fields are nearing depletion. According to Iran’s own figures and reports from the US Energy Information Administration, roughly 80 percent of Iran’s oil production “comes from aging fields facing pressure drops.” Without natural gas injection, Iran could face an “annual production decline of 8 to 10 percent.” That makes this sector ripe for external pressure.
The US Treasury Department, with support from groups such as United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI), has been successful across Democrat and Republican administrations in identifying and placing sanctions on Iran’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers—that is, tankers whose ownership and flag registration change often to evade sanctions. These efforts should be expanded.
Others have suggested creating a price cap for Iranian oil, sanctions on European sellers of ships to Iran’s shadow fleet, and sanctions on oil field service companies.
Conclusion
The core values of the Islamic regime in Iran are inimical to America, America’s security, and the security of our allies in the region. Neither sanctions nor appeasement has ever won concessions from the regime on those values, since to abandon them would mean abandoning their core supporters and showing weakness to their domestic enemies. If the United States wants to inhibit the Iranian regime’s bad behavior, we must do more than impose sanctions. We must hit them at the core.
The Iranian regime declared war on America on April 18, 1983, when they destroyed our embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. They declared war on Israel in 1985. It’s time to recognize that we are at war with this regime and to defeat it. America’s best—but, as of yet, unacknowledged—allies in this war are the freedom-loving people of Iran. Investing in their freedom is an investment in America’s freedom and security.
Ken Timmerman is a senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute. His latest work of non-fiction, The Iran House: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue, was recently published by Bombardier Books.
