There are steps the U.S. government can take to support the protests and advance our national interest.
There are steps the U.S. government can take to support the protests and advance our national interest.
T he Iranian regime is in trouble. It finds itself amid the largest mass demonstration against its rule in decades and a complete breakdown in public order triggered by the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police after she was arrested for the “offense” of removing her headscarf in public.
Thousands have taken to the streets seeking a change in what has become a nightmarish theocratic dystopia, rivaled only by the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Some have gone as far as to call for the regime’s downfall.
These protests didn’t arise out of the blue. They’re a product of years of declining living standards, economic mismanagement, and horrific human-rights abuses. Amini’s killing was just the straw that broke the Persian leopard’s back.
This grassroots uprising is reminiscent of the 2009 Green Revolution that was doomed by the Obama administration’s strategic silence. Behnam “Ben” Taleblu is urging the Biden administration not to make the same mistake. A senior fellow and Iranian security and political expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), Taleblu said in an interview with National Review that he hopes the Biden administration avoids squandering an opportunity as its Democratic predecessor did.
PHOTOS: Protests in Iran
There are concrete steps the U.S. can take to assist in the protesters’ valiant struggle against dystopian theocracy. First, exit the Iranian nuclear deal. Taleblu believes that resurrecting the Iran nuclear agreement with a regime that is hell-bent on our demise “would be a bigger moral, strategic, and political mistake than ever before.” He added, “So long as you are entertaining a deal that would ultimately fund the domestic repression we’re seeing, you’re working backward, not forwards.”
Second, financially punish the Iranian regime. Taleblu believes the Biden administration should “vigorously enforce the sanctions it inherited” and work with our European partners to “multilateralize maximum pressure” on the regime’s finances and “begin to share open-source targeting data on the worst of the worst human-rights violators. “
Finally, provide technological help to those protesting the regime. Taleblu’s preferred method: effecting change on the ground from 340 miles above. Elon Musk’s extension of Starlink satellite-Internet service to Iran to try to counter the regime’s Internet blackout is a start. But the Biden administration needs to enable Iranians to connect to the satellite-based network by providing the necessary equipment so they can actually use the uncensored and encrypted broadband. This measure would be “a major step forward in exposing the Iranian people to the full extent of the crimes of their authoritarian overlords and facilitate coordination between disparate groups of demonstrators across the country,” Taleblu says.
Taleblu believes that now is the time to tighten the screws and “double down on holding Iran accountable.” Indeed, the demise of the protest movement does not have to be inevitable. We’re living through a major inflection point for the regime, and the U.S. should recognize the magnitude of this moment. Otherwise, we are doomed to repeat past mistakes and prolong the existence of one of the world’s most tyrannical governments. Doing nothing would almost be tantamount to complicity in the regime’s crimes.