While praising the Trump administration’s maximum-pressure campaign against Tehran, which consists primarily of economic measures, Michael Makovsky sees the need for a more comprehensive approach. The U.S. goal, Makovsky argues, should be the Islamic Republic’s collapse. Looking to America’s conduct of the cold war as an example, he sets out how this can be achieved without resorting to military confrontation:
Iran is overextended internationally and economically weak, and its regime appears . . . defensive, devoid of domestic legitimacy, and vulnerable, even though its security forces are still willing to kill and imprison those who oppose the regime. The persistent protests in the country over the past few years have been driven in no small measure by the regime’s traditional support bases, many of whom—like those more antagonistic to the regime—are alienated and angered by the regime’s brutality, religious repression, waste of the country’s precious resources on foreign adventurism, [and] rampant corruption.
The current “maximum-pressure” campaign of economic sanctions has only heightened these tensions, reducing the regime’s ability to buy political quiescence. And though one can’t know what sort of regime would follow in Iran, there is cause for optimism.
[One] element of a regime-collapse strategy must be a “rollback” policy designed to weaken Iran’s power projection capabilities and evict its existing forces and proxies from critical points around the region. Rollback itself is a significant goal, a major strategic objective in its own right. It will also boost the costs of the Tehran regime’s external activities and accelerate its decline and demise.
For instance, the United States could interdict Iranian weapons supplies going through Iraq to Syria and Lebanon by land and air, and by sea to Yemen. It could also threaten Iran that it will shoot down any ballistic or cruise missiles fired by Iran or its proxies, in war or in tests, as a way to stymie its missile development in a way that sanctions clearly are not doing successfully. The same policy could apply to Iranian drones. None of these options requires new boots on the ground, but they do involve a new conception of the use of existing forces.
Read more on National Interest: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/middle-east-watch/america-must-have-regime-collapse-strategic-goal-iran-137227