Ilan Berman, senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC), spoke to a January 13 Middle East Forum Podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
As it nears its 46th anniversary, the Islamic Republic of Iran maintains its hold on power despite political isolation and pressure from the West. The regime is also approaching a “significant inflection point” which is driven by four trends:
“Secularization of Iranian polity” has led to a situation in which 75 percent of Iran’s 2,500 active mosques are “shuttered or have reduced hours as a result of the lack of attendance.”
(1) “Economic failure to thrive” impoverished the country so that, despite being rich in natural resources, “four and a half decades of clerical rule” have left the Iranian people “one third poorer than their counterparts were in early 1979 before the Islamic revolution”; (2) “Secularization of Iranian polity” has led to a situation in which 75 percent of Iran’s 2,500 active mosques are “shuttered or have reduced hours as a result of the lack of attendance,” thereby signifying a “grassroots rejection” of the legitimacy of the “religio-political authority”; (3) “Wholesale rejection of the Iranian regime” so that, with the 2022 protests against the regime’s brutalization and death of Mahsa Amini, the young Kurdish-Iranian activist arrested by the modesty police for the “crime of wearing her religious headscarf improperly,” outrage against the regime’s religious edicts has resulted in 80 percent of Iranians favoring the dissolution of the regime; and (4) “Demographics,” i.e., the current “youth bulge,” which constitutes some 60 percent of Iranians who “do not have the ideological bonds to tether them securely to the regime.”
History has shown that the prospect of a “post-theocratic Iran” would likely cause the Iranian regime to pivot towards one of three different “courses of action” as a means of surviving ominous trends: (1) China post-Mao where Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, understood the necessity of prioritizing economic, resource, industrial, and technical competence “that put the country on a trajectory of sustained growth.” Similarly, Iran’s mid-level officials are eyeing the “technocratization” of Iran; (2) Venezuela, where although the country’s regime is still strong enough to wield political control, has “progressively lost control of national borders” by its “dependence on external allies like Russia and China.” Currently, there are “telltale signs” of the Iranian regime moving in the same direction; and (3) Post-Soviet Russia, exemplified by the Soviet intelligence community, the “entrenched empowered elite” in Russia, which could have either remained ideological or “accommodate[d] themselves to the new political reality” and become pragmatic. In the 1990s, Russia chose the latter, and the KGB “became much more of an intelligence deep state.” In Iran, there is “the same sort of prevailing conditions with bodies like the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) controlling a third or more of the national economy.” In time, “they will become the dominant power in a shifting political constellation.”
A scenario which is less likely than the aforementioned courses of action is democratic change, despite the overwhelmingly “Westward-looking” and educated Iranian people who “are acutely aware of what they’re missing in economic and political terms.” This would require a serious effort on Washington’s part to harness the Iranian opposition. Historically, the U.S. “has had difficulty navigating the Iranian opposition” due to a lack of cooperation and cohesiveness among the disparate groups, with each presenting its own vision of a post-theocratic Iran to the U.S. government.
Historically, the U.S. “has had difficulty navigating the Iranian opposition” due to a lack of cooperation and cohesiveness among the disparate groups.
The AFPC tackled “what a revamped approach to the Iranian opposition would look like.” Navigating the Iranian Opposition is AFPC’s roadmap for policymakers to sort through these groups’ varied approaches for Iran’s future. Some Iranian opposition groups are calling for a “fragmentation of what is a very large, very complex federated structure.” Policymakers will need to consider whether it is prudent to financially support opposition groups “that advocate for the breakup of the Islamic Republic,” given that “Persians themselves who make up the barest of majorities in the country are diametrically opposed to” that outcome.
Another issue is the “question of religion in the constitution.” Our recent experiences with Afghanistan and Iraq “that have embedded Islam” as the “source of law in their national constitution have been less than desirable.” In a country where fewer Iranians are “beholden to the tenets” of “the rule of the jurisprudence propounded by Khomeini,” it raises the question of “whether or not it’s actually a good idea” for Islam to be the state religion in any future constitution. Finally, the approach of the Iranian regime to the nuclear issue will entail what concessions and reassurances it is willing to make “to international oversight.”
U.S. policy vis-à-vis Iran across administrations has swung like a “pendulum.” The Obama administration’s engagement with the regime produced the “naïve” 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal, which doled out financial concessions to the regime in the hopes it would “invest in butter over guns.” Instead, it enabled the mullahs to immediately recapitalize their “proxy network.” In response, the Trump administration applied its “maximum pressure” campaign—a scenario likely to be resurrected in reaction to the Biden administration’s policy which repeated President Obama’s failed approach “that we could incentivize the Iranians to behave better.”
Forthcoming Trump administration sanctions on the regime will be even more effective by factoring in “the changing identity and identification of the Iranian street” in the years since the last maximum pressure campaign. This change “makes the case” not only to return to sanctions pressure, but also to “expand and modernize maximum pressure to look at the human terrain element” as a way to “better engage” with and empower the Iranian people. By doing so, it would “harness their voices in a much more meaningful way than the Trump administration did the last time it was in power.” Any deal with Iran holds a “significant risk” for the U.S. as the regime is increasingly “unmoored from its support base.”
Forthcoming Trump administration sanctions on the regime will be even more effective by factoring in “the changing identity and identification of the Iranian street” in the years since the last maximum pressure campaign.
Teheran’s influence in the region post-October 7th rose as it courted Riyadh and entered a normalization deal brokered by China. In light of Israel’s restoration of its “strategic deterrence vis-à-vis Iran, vis-à-vis Hezbollah and Hamas” in the past six months, the Jewish state is “more of an attractive partner” for the Saudis. “What we’re looking at is a full-on collapse of this empire of influence that Iran has tried to build around the region.”
To “reconstitute its influence,” the regime will pursue three scenarios: (1) Nuclear – prior to Israel’s military decimation of Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy, and the Jewish state’s “reprisal attack” on the regime’s air defenses, Iran “inched out of the gate in terms of development of its nuclear program” to avoid provoking a response from the West. The degradation of regime proxies and air defenses “suggests that the regime is going to accelerate its nuclear development,” worrying both Washington and Jerusalem; (2) Domestic repression—Iran’s “agitated domestic opposition” is likely to increase its activism against the regime, which causes the regime to clamp down even harder on the Iranian people, as borne out in the “spike in Iranian executions” reported in the Western press; and (3) “Iran’s recapitalization of the proxy network”—regime proxies “allow Iran extensive leverage without exposing” its military weakness. Yemen’s Houthis, an example of an Iranian proxy “vexing” maritime commerce in the Persian Gulf, continue to challenge the Israeli government as “Iran still has leverage over regional discourse.”
