For a Policy to Confront the Islamic Republic of Iran
by Mariam Memarsadeghi
Shortly before the U.S. presidential election, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance said in an interview that America’s national interests will not always overlap with Israel’s, “and our interest very much is in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.”
Inside Trump’s incoming team, Vance leads the anti-war, isolationist faction that is increasingly popular with Trump’s base. It is a viewpoint at times more in line with Code Pink leftist radicalism than with the traditional Republican Party and Trump’s Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio or his National Security Advisor nominee Mike Waltz. Still, Vance simply repeated what has been the conventional wisdom of both political parties in Washington since Iran’s revolution in 1979: military action against the Islamic Republic is unwise. Trump himself has repeatedly said that he has no interest in regime change in Iran and is even willing to reward the terror state financially if it relinquishes its nuclear program.
The fear of another quagmire in the Middle East means that even the maximum pressure policy of the first Trump presidency was in fact never meant to be “maximum” at all; sanctions were always restrained by diplomacy with the intention to encourage only a change in behavior, not the fall of America’s existential enemy.
Even after the savagery inflicted on innocent Israelis on October 7, celebrated openly by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself, and the more recent overthrow of the tyrant Bashar al-Assad, the prevailing assumption in Washington remains unchanged: military action against Tehran would be too costly and too risky. What should have been a wakeup call on the perils of appeasing and even funding the godfather of global Islamist terror, which ravages not only the Middle East but the West itself, has instead led Trump to seek only a deal with Khamenei, one that would keep Iran’s evil empire in power and provide it with security guarantees and economic opportunity.
How much has the determination to avoid direct conflict with the Islamic Republic cost the United States?
With its band of “experts” lodged at think tanks, universities, and even inside the U.S. government, its adept cyber army, and its funding of protests and division in America, Iran’s regime has created the messaging apparatus to sustain a mere containment strategy against it and to extract massive, routine financial concessions. Most recently, the Biden administration released $6 billion as ransom for the release of five U.S. hostages held by the regime, and even then left behind abducted Los Angeles-based opposition activist Jamshid Sharmahd to be executed after years of solitary confinement and brutal torture. Shortly after the delivery of funds, the Islamic Republic’s proxy Hamas staged its massacre of Israelis.
The Obama administration said that the estimated $100 billion1 it released to the regime, including $400 million in pallets of cash, would bring peace and moderate the Handmaid’s Tale gender apartheid state. After the opposite so predictably resulted—the injection of new funds incentivized further hostage taking and domestic repression while the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps annihilated Syria and secured imperial dominion over the region by way of its fattened-up terror proxies and mafia networks—the Biden administration ran the same playbook, acknowledging neither Obama-era failures nor the hard-won course correction made by the Trump administration, which managed to achieve the release of U.S. hostages without paying ransoms and instead inflicted heavy financial pain and isolation on the regime.
In the cynical and hyper-partisan climate of U.S. politics, manipulated by the regime itself, Tehran has used Democratic administrations to expand its regional power and nuclear program, while it waits out Republican administrations by feigning pliant accommodation. As Javad Zarif is already demonstrating with Trump, Tehran hopes that the anti-war isolationists in Trump’s midst will win out over the hawks. The Islamic Republic plays the long game, knowing it will not face a unified, coherent U.S. foreign policy aimed at its destruction but rather warring partisan camps unwilling to put aside short-term gain for long-term, strategic national interest.
Even when a Democrat is not in power to give payouts to the regime, containing the threat from the Islamic Republic has a steep price tag. Our military presence in the region, intelligence operations, cyber defense, sanctions enforcement, diplomatic efforts, and domestic security cost the American taxpayer billions each year. Countering Iran’s regime is the chief focus of Israel and our other regional allies. They devote blood and treasure knowing that for as long as the Islamic Republic holds on, their very existence is at risk. Our military aid to these allies costs the U.S. taxpayer over $10 billion each year. This is all to say nothing of the tremendous burden on global maritime navigation from the Islamic Republic’s control of the Red Sea via Houthi rebels. This ongoing crisis batters the global economy through its impact on shipping costs, insurance rates, and supply chains, including for oil and other key commodities. The consumer pays higher prices, with no end in sight, as even NATO warships avoid the waters.
Over 500,000 Syrians and 250,000 Yemenis have been killed because of the regime’s imperial wars. Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other militant groups in the West Bank, the Fatemiyoun Brigade of Shia Afghans, the Zainabiyoun Brigade of Shia Pakistanis, Iraqi Shia militias, as well as the Taliban government of Afghanistan, not to mention drug cartels and other regime extensions of power in Latin America and across the world, work to ensure the Islamic Republic’s survival.
Khamenei’s regime has killed hundreds of Americans, and its global crime syndicates ensure that even on U.S. soil, it dares orchestrate transnational repression. When Salman Rushdie was nearly stabbed to death at a literary event in Chautauqua, New York, in 2023, the regime expressed support. Khomeini’s fatwa to kill the writer has never been rescinded. The Islamic Republic has likewise attempted to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States, and it still plots to kill Trump and his former administration officials. Iran’s regime is a singular evil in this regard; while Putin and Xi engage Trump, Khamenei proudly seeks to assassinate him.
The progressive left and the radical right’s anti-war isolationism are a gift to the Islamic Republic and to all tyrannies. America’s self-loathing, prevalent now across the political spectrum, and the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan drive the aversion to pushing for a true solution to the problem of the world’s chief exporter of Islamist ideology and terror, but so too does an outsized view of the real power of that brutal regime. The Islamic Republic is deeply dysfunctional and heavily penetrated by Israeli intelligence. Its military is decrepit. It is detested by the Iranian people.
Israeli cyber warfare and its capacity for espionage and acts of sabotage on the nuclear program have proven robust, but the regime continued to expand its terror until Israel defied the Biden administration to degrade and destroy Hamas and Hezbollah, and in so doing brought down the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Israel has also (easily) taken out the Islamic Republic’s radar and air defense systems and its ballistic missile production facilities.
The regime has never before been so vulnerable. It would be a catastrophic mistake to squander this opportunity and allow it to rebuild its power. The time is now—with a military and proxy infrastructure weakened by Israel and a new Trump administration clear-eyed about the regime’s immutable nature—to move on from piecemeal, temporary solutions and instead wage a full American aerial military campaign against the Islamic Republic, one that would leave it so weakened that the Iranian people would topple it.
America has done this before. Under the NATO umbrella in 1999, the United States bombed Slobodan Milošević’s military infrastructure, such that just two years later the Serbian people managed a successful revolution to oust him and transition to a peaceful democratic system. The Islamic Republic has shown it has no capacity for reform: it is all too eager to kill, torture, rape, and poison those who rise up against it, and even or especially when pressured with international sanctions and isolation, it has increased its funding for the IRGC, including for the Basij’s domestic repression. Unlike the Soviet Union, it will not collapse economically because it is integrated into global trade, exports $10 to $20 billion annually to China, and sells its munitions, particularly to Russia and Turkey. It will survive until the next U.S. Democratic administration.
An aerial military campaign is not an occupation. It would cost the American taxpayer a fraction of what it currently spends to try to contain the leading state sponsor of terror. It would be popular with the people of Iran and others brutalized by the regime across the region. Iranians have already welcomed Israeli airstrikes against regime targets, have argued that they cannot defeat the regime without strong international support, and have celebrated assassinations of Soleimani, Fakhrizadeh, Haniyeh, and Sinwar. They are eager and capable to join the democratic world, but they face oppressors who, unlike Gorbachev, are unwilling to back down and recognize the regime’s demise.
Taking out the Islamic Republic’s infrastructure would restore American deterrence globally and make other nefarious actors think twice about threatening global peace and security. It would give a boost to Iranian freedom fighters and ultimately bring Iran into the community of responsible nations. It would build peace with Israel through the Cyrus Accords, the Iranian extension of Trump’s Abraham Accords, and unleash a massive peace dividend. Instead of war, terror, and grotesque gender inequality, the region could transform through educational advancement, business ingenuity, technological innovation, tourism, and human development.
This would make for a true peace legacy. Trump should not allow the Islamic Republic to live past his presidency.
Topics: Israel Initiative • Reflections & Dialogues
Mariam Memarsadeghi is Founder and Director of the Cyrus Forum, Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a leading advocate for a democratic Iran. In March 2024, she participated in a TPPI Israel Initiative webinar focusing on sexual violence, feminism, and the Hamas massacre, which can be viewed here.
The $100 billion estimate is matter of some debate. See Jackie Northam, “Lifting Sanctions Will Release $100 Billion To Iran. Then What?,” NPR, July 16, 2015; Eric Pianin, “End of Sanctions Worth Hundreds of Billions to Iran,” Fiscal Times, June 29, 2015; Brian Murphy, “Iran Claims $100 Billion Now Freed in Major Step as Sanctions Roll Back,” Washington Post, February 1, 2016; Deb Riechmann, “President Obama May Not Need Congress to Defang Sanctions against Iran,”PBS News, April 16, 2015; Tom Norton, “Fact Check: Did the US Under Obama Give Iran $150 Billion?,” Newsweek, October 17, 2023.