The escalating Russian aggression in Ukraine should serve as a vivid reminder of the global threat posed not only by Moscow but also by any countries that seek to align themselves with Putin for the sake of undermining Western interests and challenging the existing world order. While the United States, Britain, and the European Union develop their strategies for averting war while also pressuring Russia to withdraw forces from Donetsk and Luhansk, they must not lose sight of the fact that other Russian forces recently coordinated with Iran and China for naval exercises in the Indian Ocean, thus signaling the continuous growth of an anti-Western bloc whose threat extends well beyond the bounds of NATO.
If left unchecked, Russian aggression could embolden different kinds of aggression from the Islamic Republic of Iran, which in recent weeks has used its regional proxies to launch drone attacks on the United Arab Emirates and deep into Saudi Arabian territory.
But at the same time, if the international community focuses too closely on the crisis in Ukraine, it runs the risk of giving Iran a greenlight to expand those sorts of actions, secure in the knowledge that leading adversaries will be too distracted to offer a suitable response.
Iran’s belligerent approach to foreign policy has only intensified since last June, when the regime appointed the ultra-hardline Ebrahim Raisi as its new president. The change of leadership promptly led to a five-month pause in the negotiations in Vienna which aim to restore the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
When Iran returned to those talks in November, it did so with an even more unreasonable set of demands, including impossible guarantees that the U.S. will never again withdraw from the deal, and relief from not just nuclear-related sanctions but also those that target Iran’s human rights abuses and terrorist activity.
The situation in Vienna has always been complicated by the fact that Russia and China are parties to the JCPOA, alongside the US, Britain, France, Germany, and the EU. Those complications are made far more serious now that the Russian incursion into Ukraine raises questions about the future of Western relations with Moscow.
If Russia faces an influx of new American and European sanctions, as it should, then Putin’s representatives to Vienna will have even greater incentive to back to unreasonable Iranian demands that have defined those talks for the past two months.
More than that, Russia’s pending isolation could prompt further expansions in military and economic cooperation between it and the Islamic Republic, to the detriment of Western leverage over both. With that in mind, American and European policymakers must resolve to exploit available leverage immediately.
If Tehran will not sign onto a longer and stronger nuclear deal immediately after negotiators next meet, then the Biden administration should immediately move to re-impose “maximum pressure” on the regime, this time with backing from all European allies.
The more economically weakened that regime becomes in the near-term, the less valuable it will be to Moscow as a tool of sanctions-evasion over the longer term.
Furthermore, increasing pressure on Tehran under present circumstances could have transformative effects for the region, ultimately depriving Russia of the existing lifeline in its entirety. This is because the Islamic Republic has been the site of historic popular unrest since a nationwide uprising in January 2018, and the regime now appears to be struggling not only to manage that unrest but also to maintain its hold on power.
The 2018 uprising prompted Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to acknowledge for the first time that a pro-democracy opposition group known as the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran had expanded its social influence to the point at which it was able to lead simultaneous protests in well over 100 cities. In November 2019, another uprising encompassed nearly 200 localities and featured the same slogans demanding removal of the theocratic dictatorship. Authorities cracked down fiercely on that unrest, killing 1,500 people in a matter of days. But just two months later, protesters were back out in the streets in more than a dozen provinces.
One of the key figures in that crackdown was Ebrahim Raisi, then head of the judiciary. His subsequent appointment to the presidency was widely recognized as the supreme leader’s endorsement of further political violence, particularly against the MEK. In 1988, Raisi had served as one of four officials on the Tehran “death commission” that initiated a massacre of political prisoners which expressly targeted the MEK and claimed 30,000 lives over the course of three months. But far from intimidating the public into silence, his promotion elicited new protests and an electoral boycott that resulted in the lowest voter turnout for presidential elections since the advent of the Islamic Republic. Soon after Raisi’s appointment to that office was confirmed, the Iranian opposition leader Maryam Rajavi delivered a speech in which she predicted that in “new era” would see “hostility and enmity between the Iranian regime and society… intensify more than ever before.”
The past several months have seemingly borne out that prediction, not just because large-scale protests have continued but also because activist strategies have diversified and expanded their reach. In early January, MEK-affiliated “Resistance Units” torched a newly-unveiled statue of the late Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, perhaps the most prominent symbol of the Iranian regime’s Resistance to a U.S.-led world order. Then later that month, hackers infiltrated state media outlets in order to broadcast the now-familiar slogan “death to the dictator,” along with a portion of a speech by the Iranian Resistance’s Leader Massoud Rajavi.
Even more recently, similar broadcasts have been heard in several highly-trafficked public spaces, thus highlighting the widespread embrace of the opposition messages about regime change and democratic governance. Meanwhile, within Western policy circles, supporters of the oppositional group have been passionately arguing that a stronger approach to Iran policy would signal support for the domestic activists pursuing regime change, and would help them to overcome the already faltering repression that allows the mullahs to cling to their power.
Such arguments have always had substantial weight. They no doubt became even more appealing after the Raisi administration returned to the nuclear talks with new demands and a more belligerent tone. The same arguments should appear irrefutable now that the Tehran’s belligerence is growing in lock-step with Moscow’s. As dangerous as each of those adversaries can be on their own, they would be far more dangerous if they were able to continue reinforcing one another’s worst behaviors and distracting the international community from a bigger picture
The only way to assure that that cannot happen is by drastically changing some aspect of the situation that has allowed Iranian-Russian relations to flourish. Although truly punishing sanctions on each country may be a step in that direction, the seriousness of the emerging crisis calls for a bolder gambit. Support for Iran’s Resistance movement may not guarantee regime change, but if the opposition does achieve the goal of recent and ongoing uprisings, the result will certainly be a democratic Iran with a natural affinity for democratic nations. This, as much as anything else, will greatly diminish the support structure for authoritarian regimes.
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