As the United States conducts critical negotiations on a nuclear deal with Iran, the Iranian authorities will continue to stall, bluster, negotiate and renegotiate. In short, they will seek to run out the clock until President Trump’s attention is diverted elsewhere to some more immediate crisis at home or abroad.
If they do sign a deal, the Iranian regime will seek to water down the conditions, just enough so that Trump can declare victory and walk away. Then they can turn their focus to what they consider the most serious threat to the regime — their own people.
The swift demise of the Assad regime in Syria provides a cautionary tale for the Iranian regime. Its fall came about not from any external power, but from within.
The same popular resistance exists inside Iran, where more than 80 percent of the country oppose the Islamic regime. Protests have rocked the country over the last few years, in which activists and ordinary people regularly chant “Death to the Islamic Republic” and “Death to the dictator.”
Worse still for Iran’s leaders, there is unease and uncertainty among the foot soldiers, the rank and file who carry out the regime’s orders. They have watched the once vaunted Islamic Republic incur serial humiliations, and as Israel and the U.S. have gutted one after another of their vaunted ring-of-fire proxy forces.
Amid external and internal strife, the Iranian regime will seek, in the words of a prominent professor inside Iran who prefers to stay anonymous for security reasons, to “hibernate” until Donald Trump has left the stage. In the meantime, the regime has already ratcheted up domestic repression in an effort to contain ever-growing popular discontent.
The success of the Iranian regime’s strategy will depend on whether the administration expands conditions in any grand bargain to consider its impact on the Iranian people. As currently proposed, the agreement focuses exclusively on Iran’s military capabilities — providing sanctions relief in exchange for stringent restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program.
If pressed to make such a deal, the Islamic Republic will likely agree. After the attention of the world has moved elsewhere, the Iranian regime, flush with cash from sanctions relief, would move quickly to crush internal dissent and consolidate its control of the country.
There is a precedent to follow. In 1988, exhausted after eight years of war with Iraq, Iran struck a deal to end the war it had pledged to fight until victory, then went back home to regroup and rebuild. Repairing economic ties with the world was paired with the violent suppression of domestic dissent — kicked off by the mass murder of some 5,000 political prisoners — and massive investments in its malign proxy forces, Hezbollah, Hamas and Syria.
A grand bargain that focuses solely on Iran’s military capacities would enable the regime to emerge unscathed from the looming crisis posed by the Iranian people, who overwhelmingly oppose the regime’s policies of confrontation with the U.S. and Israel and its support for regional proxies. The nature of the Islamic Republic would remain the same, and it would retain its doctrine of strategic patience in its confrontation with the West. Ignoring precedent, the Trump grand bargain would simply kick the can down the road, leaving another U.S. administration to deal with the inevitable backsliding of a recidivist regime.
In the interests of U.S. national security, the Trump administration should seek to empower the one actor that poses the greatest long-term threat to the Iranian regime: the Iranian people.
The administration can do so by incorporating a parallel track in negotiations that seeks to provide maximum support for the Iranian people, building on the bipartisan congressional Maximum Support Act that seeks to protect citizens’ access to online communications. This support should involve conditions that put constraints on the Iranian regime’s ability to lash out at Iranian protesters and political prisoners after an agreement is signed. Such conditions could include an immediate halt to political executions, United Nations inspections of Evin and other prisons in which political prisoners are housed, the cessation of the use of lethal force against protesters, and an end to prosecutions for peaceful dissent.
Initially, Iran would reject such conditions, but it might reconsider if its economy continues to crumble, the drums of war beat louder, or their foot soldiers start shedding their uniforms to blend in with the regular population.
The Trump administration would make a grave mistake to bail out the Iranian regime while allowing them to consolidate control by crushing popular resistance. In order to forge a truly historic agreement, Trump should seek not only to disarm Iran but also to defend and empower the Iranian people who will and have fought bravely to change the nature of the Iranian regime.
Standing by the Iranian people is not just a moral imperative. It is in the national security interests of the United States to do so.
Michael Eisner is general counsel of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, and Saeid Dehghan is a prominent Iranian human rights lawyer and director of the Parsi Law Collective.