As the Islamic Republic faces persistent unrest in its streets, it continues its steady march to acquiring nuclear weapons, and Washington appears to lack a comprehensive or consistent approach toward the country. Mark Dubowitz and Orde Kittrie carefully describe what such an approach could, and ought to, entail:
America should adopt a “rollback” strategy to intensify the existing weaknesses of the regime and to support the Iranian people’s goal of establishing a government that abandons the quest for nuclear weapons and is neither internally repressive nor regionally aggressive. To accomplish this, the American administration should take a page from the playbook President Ronald Reagan first used against the Soviet Union. In the early 1980s, Reagan seriously upgraded his predecessors’ containment strategy by pushing policies designed to roll back Soviet expansionism. The cornerstone of his strategy was the recognition that the Soviet Union was an aggressive and revolutionary yet internally fragile state that Washington could defeat.
The Biden administration should address every aspect of the Iranian menace, not merely the nuclear program. A narrow focus on disarmament paralyzes American policy and has deterred the Biden administration from responding to Iran’s non-nuclear misconduct out of fear that Tehran would withdraw from nuclear negotiations. Engagement with the Islamic Republic as an end in itself has reflected the same delusions that American leaders entertained about Communist China. Those delusions of engagement made China more wealthy and more powerful and aggressive but did not moderate China’s rulers. . . . The Islamic Republic cannot be reformed; it must be rolled back. That is the message of the Iranian protesters.
Washington should target the regime’s terrorist networks, influence operations, and proliferation of weapons, missiles, and drones. Iranian military support for Vladimir Putin’s murder of Ukrainians, and growing Russian support for the Islamic Republic’s military expansion, should be a wakeup call for Washington and Europe that Tehran’s malign activities will not remain confined to the Middle East. Biden must develop a more muscular covert-action program and greenlight closer cooperation with allied intelligence agencies.
Dubowitz and Kittrie go on to detail how all this can be accomplished, by using more robust sanctions, interdicting the shipment of weapons, coordinating efforts across government agencies, countering Iranian cyberwarfare, restricting air travel, and taking action in Iraq, Syria, and Latin America—among much else.
More about: Iran, U.S. Foreign policy