Iran Needs Regime Change, Not Rewards

Lincoln P. Bloomfield Jr.

The future of Iran is taking shape, and the Washington establishment, inside and outside of government, has a lot of catching up to do.
Imagine for a moment that Tehran’s representatives contacted US Envoy Steve Witkoff and offered full dismantlement of their nuclear enrichment program, reliably verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and a commitment to forego any steps to build or acquire a nuclear weapon. The price? The United States would lift sanctions on Iran, unfreeze funds, and permit Iran to trade freely through the global financial system. Iran might also require assurances that its nuclear sites would face no further attacks by the United States or Israel.
After more than two decades of frustrating effort, an elusive national security goal would finally be at hand: an end to the Iran nuclear threat. How could the United States say no?
And yet, for many good reasons, “no” is the only acceptable answer. Here are five:
First, Iran has never seriously adopted the goal of becoming a nuclear weapons state. The Soviet Union and the United States took six years to build an atomic bomb more than a half-century ago. Others did it in a dozen years or less. Iran, however, has been enriching uranium for 37 years, sometimes edging nearer to the weapons threshold, provoking headlines and official attention in Western capitals, but making sure never to trigger a crisis response. Tehran obviously finds the enrichment program useful even without a bomb.

Second, a major consideration for Iran is that Saudi Arabia has, since 2008, made clear that if Iran obtains the bomb, Saudi Arabia will do the same. After decades of pledging “death to Israel,” the supreme leader would face two unpalatable options if he had a deliverable nuclear weapon: either disregard the religious “duty” in whose name hundreds of thousands of Iranian regime security forces, mine-clearing children, and imprisoned dissidents (not to mention Hamas fanatics) have been sacrificed; or risk a suicidal nuclear escalation with Israel, one where the leader of Twelver Shi’ism could end up destroying the Al-Aqsa Mosque, site of the Prophet’s “night journey” and Islam’s third holiest site.
Third, Iran does not deserve a ransom for agreeing not to damage the international nuclear nonproliferation regime. If any country profits by threatening international peace and security, that is a failure of policy. The right goal here is deterrence. There is clearly a bipartisan consensus in the United States that Iran must never have the bomb. This is, effectively, a national security doctrine, although never promulgated by an American president.

Fourth, in any case, the United States already paid Iran for its restraint on this issue. President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA nuclear accord in 2018. Did Iran return the $1.7 billion payment ($400 million in currency delivered on pallets) made in 2016? No, nor did Tehran ever look back in capitalizing on two other major concessions by the United States: lifting the UN Security Council’s prohibition on Iran’s ballistic missile development and its arms embargo on Iran. These “sweeteners,” offered to gain Tehran’s agreement to the JCPOA in 2015, led to deadly ballistic missile and drone attacks against Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and Israel.
Fifth, rewarding Iran on the nuclear issue would exonerate it for unforgivable crimes. This is the untold story that Tehran has tried to suppress, with much success. But now the true history of the regime’s darkest crimes is being uncovered. US policy must admit its past failures and, with allies, treat this dictatorship as a hostile threat to US interests.
Iran’s Choice: Good Neighbor, or Bad Actor?
A potent if unfounded belief shaping decades of US policy on Iran has been that, with the right policy posture in Washington, fundamentalist Iran will temper its hostility and cease its destabilizing activities. On June 22, Vice President JD Vance, appearing on Meet the Press, articulated a version of such a policy approach toward Iran:
“We believe very strongly that there are two pathways; there is a pathway where Iran continues to fund terrorism, continues to try to build a nuclear program, attacks American troops—that’s the bad pathway for Iran … There’s another pathway on the table here; there’s a pathway where Iran integrates itself into the international community, stops funding terrorism and stops trying to pursue a nuclear weapon.”
Offering Tehran this choice seems eminently sensible, but the vice president and his advisors may not realize that Washington policymakers have floated this same proposition for a very long time. Twenty years ago, soon after The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) revealed Iran’s secret nuclear enrichment program, former Ambassador and Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman, with coauthor Ray Takeyh, wrote that Iran’s leaders needed to recognize that they face “a stark choice—they can have nuclear weapons or a healthy economy, but not both.” Three years later in 2008, as the late General Qasem Soleimani and Iran’s Qods Force were busy arming and directing non-state militias to kill over 600 U.S. military forces deployed in the region, and as Tehran’s diplomats “bought time” for the enrichment program by misleading Western envoys seeking verifiable curbs on Iran’s nuclear efforts, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote this in Foreign Affairs:
“Iran must make a strategic choice … about how and to what ends it will wield its power and influence. Does it want to continue thwarting the legitimate demands of the world, advancing its interests through violence, and deepening the isolation of its people? Or is it open to a better relationship, one of growing trade and exchange, deepening integration, and peaceful cooperation with its neighbors and the broader international community?”

A year later, as the Iranian people took to the streets in protest following the blatant fraud accompanying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection, regime forces fired on their fellow citizens, with the death of 29-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan dramatically captured on video. Demonstrators demanding change—dubbed the “green movement”—nearly overwhelmed security forces in the capital city. On February 14, 2013, with Arab Spring protests erupting in Syria after deposing autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt, a senior Iranian cleric, Mehdi Taeb, was overheard warning a gathering of Bassij units that if they “lost” Damascus—if the repressive regime of Bashar al-Assad were to fall—they could not “hold” Tehran.

Thus began Iran’s massive deployment of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) troops, Qods Force operatives, militias, mercenaries, cash, and weapons into bases throughout neighboring Syria, a military intervention that, in coordination with Syrian and later Russian forces, drove 6 million Syrians out of their own country, at a cost to Iran of over $50 billion. Policymakers in Washington, however, were far more interested in the headline-making news that Iran had agreed to enter nuclear negotiations with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany—the P5+1.

The prevailing assumption within the US policy community was that Iran had little choice but to come to the negotiating table, so acute was its need for trade with the West to relieve its battered economy. One can only speculate how the P5+1 negotiators’ attitudes might have differed had they known that the supreme leader controlled upwards of $100 billion in resources at the time, or understood how much of the country’s oil and gas revenues were being channeled to support the IRGC, Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), and other regime security priorities including the nuclear program. If evidence exists that the needs of the Iranian people have ever been treated as a priority by their clerical dictators, it has not appeared in Washington.

For two years, Iranian officials led by the ever-collegial Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif sat with P5+1 envoys at negotiating tables in Vienna, Geneva, and Lausanne, feeding their interlocutors’ hope and expectation that an agreement would leave Iran no “pathways” to a nuclear weapon. In Washington, analysts touted President Hassan Rouhani’s “moderate” government, apparently unaware that one of his vice presidents, Massoumeh Ebtekar, had been a core member of the group that had held American diplomats hostage for 444 days, or that his defense minister, Hossein Deghan, had, in the early 1980s, been the ranking IRGC officer in Lebanon who initiated the training of Hezbollah recruits in the Bekaa Valley and oversaw the terrorist bombings of the US Embassy and Marine Barracks.

President Barack Obama articulated his own vision of a better “path” for Tehran in his 2013 address to the UN General Assembly. A nuclear accord with Iran, he said, would be “a major step down a long road towards a different relationship, one based on mutual interests and mutual respect.”Within days of the JCPOA fully entering into force in January 2016, Iran was testing ballistic missiles. In 2018, Iranian spies were caught planning three terror attacks in Europe, their plans set in motion well before President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the nuclear accord. Two bombing operations were planned in Albania, the residence since 2016 of the nearly 3,000 men and women of Iran’s most steadfast resistance, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK). The third operation was a plan to detonate a powerful TATP explosive inside the major annual gathering in support of the NCRI, held north of Paris and attended by tens of thousands of people.

The Paris bombing would, if not foiled by European authorities, have been a mass-casualty event on a par with the worst acts of ISIS terrorism. Several prominent Americans, mainly political and military former senior leaders, were seated with NCRI leader Mrs. Maryam Rajavi. The Belgian Court indicted the perpetrators, led by an Iranian MOIS agent accredited as a diplomat at Iran’s Embassy in Vienna. The court report described a branch of the MOIS dedicated to operations against the NCRI and MEK. The bomb was built and tested in Iran and transported to Vienna from Iran aboard a commercial airline flight.

Once the Iranian agent, Assadolah Assadi, was convicted by the Belgian court and his 20-year prison sentence was upheld on appeal, the regime seized a Belgian hostage, Olivier Vandecasteele, working in Iran for the Norwegian Refugee Council. After condemning the humanitarian worker to 40 years in prison and 74 lashes for “espionage,” Iran persuaded the Belgian government to sign an extradition agreement and trade the spy to gain freedom for the hostage. This led to a similar act of geopolitical vandalism in Sweden, where Hamid Noury had been convicted in 2022 of war crimes for his role in the 1988 massacre of up to 30,000 political prisoners. Having lost two appeals in 2023 and 2024, Nouri nevertheless avoided serving his life sentence. He went home in June 2024 in exchange for Swedish EU official Johan Floderus, seized as a hostage in Iran by the regime in 2022.
The Sun Sets on American Hopes for Reform and Moderation in Tehran
When P5+1 negotiators agreed, under the JCPOA, that Iran would be allowed to import previously-restricted ballistic missile technologies and manufacture more advanced centrifuges after eight years (in 2023), loosen limits on the numbers of centrifuges at Natanz, and install more advanced versions after 10 years (in 2026), and be free of any enrichment and stockpile limits altogether after 15 years (in 2031), these and other “sunset clauses” were a calculated bet on the part of the United States and its European allies that by the time the restrictions expired, Iran would be more moderate and cooperative.

Surely, US officials in 2015 never imagined that Iran in 2025 would be the terror ringleader that in 2023 sabotaged growing normalization between Israel and its Arab neighbors by staging a proxy war and launching ballistic missile attacks against Israel; waged a crime spree, including hostage seizures and murder-for-hire operations in Europe, North America, and even Australia; and crushed dissent with rampant executions, now averaging more than 100 per month. It seems inconceivable that negotiators would have agreed to sunset clauses all but inviting Iran to become, in the future, an internationally-accepted nuclear weapons state had they thought these benefits would accrue to the malignant Iran of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet this is the situation the United States and its allies now confront.

Beyond Enrichment—Address the Non-Nuclear Threat

If Iran now offers nuclear restraint, America cannot give its rulers a free pass for 46 years of violent aggression against their own people and the outside world, including the United States. The list of transgressions against American interests and principles is long.

More than a few of these crimes demand justice regardless of the passage of time:
• The killing, throughout the 1980s, of tens of thousands of Iranian Muslim men and women who, having just succeeded in evicting the corrupt and brutal monarchy, would not endorse Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s punitive, dictatorial version of Islam. The UN Special Rapporteur in 2024, concluding a six-year investigation, characterized the regime’s systematic torture and executions of MEK members as “genocide.”

• The deadly truck bombings and hostage-takings in Lebanon during the 1980s by Iran and its proxies, targeting the United States and European allies and inflicting lasting harm upon the Lebanese state and population.

• The mass killing in the summer and fall of 1988 of up to 30,000 political prisoners, mostly members and sympathizers of the pro-democracy MEK, on the orders of Khomeini, an atrocity crime compared by a prominent human rights attorney to Srebrenica and the Bataan Death March.

• The assassinations and assaults targeting regime opponents in France, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, including translators of Salman Rushdie’s controversial book Satanic Verses attacked in Norway, Turkey, Italy, and Japan, and the two worst terror bombings in Argentina’s history, followed by the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. airmen—all in the early-mid 1990s.

• The seven deadly attacks in Iraq between 2009-2016 by Iran’s proxies, enabled by Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, against the 3,000 defenseless MEK men and women there who had voluntarily handed all their weapons over to the U.S. Army, had been thoroughly vetted by US intelligence and law enforcement officers, and had been individually granted a formal US pledge of protection. Over 140 were killed and more than 1,000 wounded before Albania offered the MEK members a new home.

• The displacement of millions of Sunni Syrian families beginning in 2013, as the IRGC rescued Syria’s Assad regime while supplying weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Since 2015, at least 19 seaborne shipments of Iranian weapons have been intercepted en route to the Houthis of Yemen and beyond; one can only speculate about how much Iranian weaponry and cash reached the tunnels of Gaza.

The October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack against Israel will not be found on any official US list of historic crimes by the clerics of Iran—but it should be. Immediately following the attack, US officials cited “exquisite” intelligence that Iran had been “surprised” by the Hamas attack.

Iran’s late Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, a longtime ally of Soleimani and the Qods Force before moving over to the Foreign Ministry, characterized Iran as a “bystander.” Although the US Intelligence Community formally exonerated Iran in its 2024 annual worldwide threat assessment, a wealth of evidence has surfaced placing key Iranians in planning sessions with Hamas and Hezbollah prior to October 7 and reportedly approving the operation; Iranian operatives later claimed credit for the Hamas attack. Khamenei’s English-language tweets, even as the attack was unfolding (“the usurper Zionist regime is coming to an end”), hardly indicate “surprise.” Said an advisor to Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, “Tehran is sacrificing the blood of the Palestinian people for its own interests.”
Khamenei is implicated in these offenses against international peace and security, and more. He became Iran’s president in October 1981, oversaw the “reign of terror,” and was still president during the 1988 massacre of political prisoners ordered by Khomeini. When Khomeini’s presumed successor, Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, bitterly protested this crime against humanity, Khomeini bypassed him, and Khamenei became supreme leader in 1989.

Perhaps to compensate for his lack of religious stature compared with the fearsome Khomeini, Khamenei launched a campaign of terror extending from Buenos Aires to Tokyo and many capitals in between; regime envoys relentlessly pressed Western capitals to regard, and treat, pro-democracy Iranian Muslims opposed to fundamentalist rule as Marxists, terrorists, and a cult. It worked. Only now are the magnitude of Tehran’s offenses against universal norms, and the scope of its deception operations, becoming apparent.

The United States should be urgently contemplating measures to make it less likely that there will ever be a third supreme leader.

Is There Really No Alternative to this Regime?

Key to the clerical dictatorship’s longevity has been its success in shaping the information domain, at home and abroad. Tehran’s propaganda operation has relied on agents of influence in the West, demonizing the NCRI and MEK with false (and now definitively debunked) allegations, and blaming US sanctions policy for the country’s economic woes while the regime appropriates the nation’s considerable wealth for its own ends. Tehran poses as the victim of American “arrogance” and hegemony, even as its security services wage shadow warfare through proxy forces and hired criminal gangs to maintain a veneer of deniability. Viewed through Tehran’s prism, American forces—not Qods Force and IRGC-backed militias—are the main source of tension in the Middle East, and the United States is an unreliable international actor because it withdrew from the nuclear accord. Such themes have found support in Western think tanks, journals, and academia, raising questions about Iran’s possible leverage over some credentialed US experts.

Of all the propaganda themes that Tehran has cultivated in Western capitals, none has been more consistent than the notion that the regime’s power is unbreakable, and that there is no credible alternative to the fundamentalist Islamic Republic. The beginning of wisdom will be to realize that the very opposite is closer to the truth.

If no credible alternative to the current regime existed, and if the fundamentalist ruling franchise in Tehran were truly invulnerable, Trump (in 2019) and Vance (in 2025) would have seen no point in pledging, as each did, that the United States does not seek regime change in Iran. In truth, the clerics of Tehran fear nothing so much as being swept from power, like the shah before them. By far their number one preoccupation for 46 years has been to stave off the overthrow that has awaited them from their earliest days.

The fateful regime attack on a half-million pro-democracy demonstrators in Tehran on June 20, 1981, the reign of terror that ran for years thereafter, the 1988 massacre of up to 30,000 political prisoners—an atrocity crime the regime is now, in 2025, threatening to repeat—the use of deadly force against demonstrators in 1999, 2009, 2017-18, 2019, 2022, and since, and the relentless, continuing executions of dissidents following sham trials, illustrate vividly that Iran’s rulers survive only through brutal repression of their own people, women as well as men, who court mortal danger in demanding an end to religious tyranny.

Why is this regime so paranoid? Why has it taken such pains to press the United States and European governments to restrict the NCRI and MEK? If the propaganda image of the Iranian resistance were remotely accurate—i.e., if they were an isolated, brainwashed cult of Marxist terrorists with American blood on their hands—the regime would have felt no need to produce well over 500 books and countless films and television series since the revolution, with an average of over 100 articles per month for the last three decades, all demonizing the group with allegations that do not hold up to investigative scrutiny.

The reality is that the NCRI and MEK, led by women at every level, are well-organized, politically astute, and loyally supported by large numbers in the diaspora and “resistance units” inside Iran. The regime no longer tries to hide its alarm about growing support for the one Iranian opposition that proposes to restore political agency to the citizens of Iran. NCRI leader Maryam Rajavi’s 10-Point Plan for the Future of Iran, which she has tirelessly advocated for 19 years, has been endorsed by 137 former heads of government, 80 Nobel laureates, and majorities in 34 national parliaments comprising over 4,000 parliamentarians, including a bipartisan majority of the US House of Representatives…

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/iran-needs-regime-change-not-rewards