In a meeting at the White House to discuss the upcoming transition, President Joe Biden acknowledged to President-elect Donald Trump that Iran is the most pressing foreign threat to the United States, its allies, and their collective interests.
That threat has been underscored over the past year by worsening conflict between Israel and Iran’s militant proxies in the surrounding region, which has twice given way to direct exchanges of fire between the two countries. And just this past week, the meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Board of Governors called further attention to the fact that concerns over Iran’s possible breakout to nuclear weapons capability are as salient as ever.
Nevertheless, comparatively less attention has been given to the threats that Iran’s theocratic dictatorship poses to its own people. Since undergoing its own presidential transition last summer, following the death of Ebrahim Raisi,the Islamic Republic has surged its use of executions and claimed hundreds of lives, including at least 178 in October alone.
It now appears likely that the total number of executions in 2024 will surpass the total from the previous year, which exceeded 850 – an eight-year high. The unfortunate trend reflects a broader crackdown on dissent that was motivated by the nationwide uprising that began in September 2022after the morality police killed a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, for allegedly wearing her mandatory headscarf too loosely.
The mass executions and politically motivated arrests and prosecutions are indicative of the regime’s fear of popular revolt. Countrywide unrest in 2022 was widely recognized as the greatest challenge to that regime’s hold on power since its inception in the wake of the 1979 revolution, with elements persisting today in the form of anonymous public advocacy for regime change and mass boycotts of parliamentary and presidential elections.
With tensions between the regime and the Iranian people worsening, it is increasingly clear that a complete change of regime spearheaded by the Iranian resistance is the only acceptable political outcome. Iran policy scholars in theUnited Stateshave long understood that the Iranian people are natural allies when it comes to confronting threats emanating from Tehran.
Now there is a growing recognition of this reality on the other side of the Atlantic.
At a recent conference in the European Parliament, senior European officials from diverse political backgrounds joined Resistance leader Maryam Rajavi in criticizing Western policymakers for chronically overlooking the Iranian people in the development of their strategies for dealing with the regime and accused them of too often embracing policies that tend toward appeasement.
A more effective approach, according to Rajavi and the Members of Parliament that spoke alongside her, is to leverage the discontent on the Iranian street by exerting maximum pressure on Tehran for the express purpose of empowering the Iranian people to complete the process of overthrow that commenced with the anti-regime rebellion of 2022.
This strategy has long been undermined by an incorrect belief – often peddled by the regime’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) and its agents – that no viable alternative to the current regime exists and that support for regime change would only lead to chaos or protracted, partisan violence.
In response to those concerns, Rajavi presented a roadmap for political change facilitated by the opposition organization she leads, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). Specifically, she articulated a “Process for Regime Change and the Role of the Organized Resistance” that leverages key components of her coalition, including the Army of Freedomtogether with the female-led Resistance Units leading the charge with the NCRI as the democratic alternative to the mullahs.
Rajavi declared that that within six months of the mullahs’ overthrow, elections would be held for a Constituent Assembly, which would then “appoint a new government for a two-year term to draft, approve, and hold a referendum on the constitution of the new republic.”
“This structured approach ensures that, with a viable alternative in place, there will be no room for chaos,” Rajavi said, before expressing confidence that millions of Iranian expatriates would return to their homeland during and after the implementation of this plan, bringing along “expertise and resources” to help smooth the transition to a secular, Western-style democracy.
In the meantime, the NCRI’s principal constituent group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), can be expected to continue its oversight of a nationwide network of Resistance Unitsactively pushing for regime change while awaiting the support of the international community they have long deserved.
Any serious discussion of Iran policy – whether in Europe or the United States – must acknowledge that, at least since 2022, the Iranian people have been united in one purpose: toppling their clerical rulers.
Guided by a well-organized Resistance movement, regime change from within is the only permanent solution to the Iran threat, both domestic and global. The role of the Iranian people and their resistance have been overlooked for too long. It is time for a new approach that prioritizes the people’s calls for a democratic transition by rejecting the regime’s authoritarian rulers as a permanent fixture of the Middle East landscape.
Ivan Sascha Sheehan is a professor of Public and International affairs and the associate dean of the College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore. Opinions expressed are his own. Follow him on X @ProfSheehan