Kicking the Can Down the Road: Saving the Ayattolah

Talks between the United States and Iran continue this week in Geneva.

When desperate Iranians poured into the streets demanding regime change, President Trump pledged that help was on the way, only to retreat. In the aftermath, credible human rights organizations report that thousands of protesters were killed and many more arrested in a sweeping crackdown designed to extinguish dissent.

Now it appears the administration has chosen to defer confrontation in favor of negotiation. The pattern is familiar: pressure followed by pursuit of a deal. As in Venezuela, where engagement and economic overtures failed to dislodge a repressive regime despite widely disputed elections, the governing apparatus endured.

Tehran understands the language of leverage and Trump’s susceptibility to profitable business deals. It has reportedly floated the prospect of lucrative energy, mining, and aircraft agreements in exchange for relief from punitive economic sanctions. Yet the offer comes with a critical caveat: Iran would modify, but not relinquish, its uranium enrichment and leave untouched its ballistic missile programs.

Such an arrangement would not dismantle the regime’s capacity for repression at home or projection of force abroad. It would instead stabilize a government that has spent nearly half a century suppressing its people and destabilizing the Middle East, while edging ever closer to nuclear weapons capability and refining the missiles to deliver it.

Yes, help may indeed be on the way, but not for Iran’s beleaguered citizens if sanctions are lifted without fundamental change. It will be relief for the very regime that has kept them in chains.

—rj