While China must remain viewed as a potential strategic adversary, we must recognize the serious Iranian threat to our national security.  The United States is badly distracted by serious matters — and self-absorbed in campaign histrionics. We are confronted with protracted regional wars in Gaza and Ukraine. There has been an attempted assassination of former president Trump, as well as the arrest of a Pakistani with alleged links to Iran whom the FBI believes was to target Trump, among others.

Our national attention is on the daily barrage of campaign disparagements, parrying, and verbal onslaughts; representations subjected to a phalanx of fact checkers; obsession with seven so-called battleground states; a presidential candidate cleverly concealed behind a teleprompter; the anxious expectation of inflation indexes and unemployment data; gyrations of the Dow Jones and S&P indices, and NASDAQ.

America is not focused — and our enemies know it. From now until the January inauguration, we enter a particularly dangerous period in which U.S. assets and interests are at risk.  And since it is an election year with a lame duck president and vice president without foreign policy experience, and since it is not even clear who is running the United States, we should expect to be further tormented by the axis of bad actors — Iran in particular.

Feckless Iranian Policy

Our Iran foreign policy has been feckless for years.  A naïve Obama Administration was desperate to consummate an agreement to discourage or retard Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon — later abandoned by the Trump Administration. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known simply as the Iran nuclear agreement, was unwisely unlinked to Iranian adventurism in the Middle East.

Yet the Biden Administration, acting like a supplicant, tried unsuccessfully to restore the agreement. And amazingly, in March the Biden Administration unfroze $10 billion of Iranian blocked funds.

Funded by oil export revenues, over the years Iran has successfully built up formidable proxies in the region, although it is not clear how much control Iran always has over them. Hamas has up to an estimated 12,000 militants remaining; Hezbollah which claims to have 100,000 fighters (with independent estimates much less) and up to 200,000 rockets and missiles, according to Washington-based CSIS; an estimated 40 Iran-backed groups or militias, including but not limited to Iraq and Syria; and the Houthi rebels of Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula estimated by British sources at 20,000. (Not surprisingly, Al Jazeera quotes Houthi sources of over 200,000).

Houthi attacks on commercial and Western naval vessels have reduced traffic through the Red Sea by over 50 percent, and conducted more than 190 attacks, affecting 65 countries and 29 shipping companies, according to USNI News in June. In short, the Middle East is on fire, “a-bobbin’ like a basket full o’ snakes,” in the words of Nobel Laureate Rudyard Kipling who wrote on India. (READ MORE from Frank Schell: Xi Jinping: When Will I Be Loved?)

In the meantime, Iran marches relentlessly toward uranium enrichment sufficient for a nuclear weapon — the length of time to produce sufficient weapons-grade uranium (“breakout time’) is now said to be 1-2 weeks by Secretary Antony Blinken, although more time is needed for assembly of a device.

The world has already seen the effects of nuclear blackmail by President Vladimir Putin of Russia that have restrained the response of NATO and the U.S. since his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, so imagine the potential bullying of moderate Middle East countries and the West.

America does not need another war in the Islamic world, after its disastrous experience of nearly 20 years in Afghanistan, and the ISIS Sunni backlash after the fall of Baghdad in 2003.

Best Iranian Policy Options

What should we do about this? First and foremost, the U.S. should enforce the sanctions on Iran imposed by the Trump Administration. As recently reported by the Wall Street Journal, between 2018 and 2020, those sanctions cut oil exports from 2.5 million barrels per day to 70,000, preventing Iran from realizing $50 billion in oil proceeds.

Further, in 2019 then-President Hassan Rouhani stated that U.S. sanctions had cost Iran $200 billion, reducing Iranian military outlays by 28 percent — to the detriment of Iran’s surrogates in the Middle East. Indeed, sanctions have a downside: They can impoverish a country and give China and Russia an entrée, as we have seen, and the price of gas at the pump will go up.

Second, Iran should be put on notice that any Iranian vessels that assist the Houthis in targeting missiles and drones against U.S. naval assets and international commercial ships will be sunk. This action was recommended to President Biden in March by Republican Senator Dan Sullivan, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Third, the power of the president of the United States should be brought to bear to address the Iranian people. President Obama has admitted that he erred in not supporting the Iranian pro-democracy uprising in 2009 known as the Green Movement — his objective was said to be a nuclear agreement, not regime change.

Direct messaging the Iranian people would say that the United States supports them in their aspiration for democracy, that Iran’s isolation and status as a rogue nation will end, and that as a carrot, the U.S. will assist in the development of Iran’s energy industry if they oust the current fundamentalist regime and replace it with fair elections and democracy. (READ MORE: Starbucks Does It Again With Oleato)

There are still some moderate elements in Iran, including for example the new president, Masoud Pezeshkian. Further, the Iranian regime is not monolithic like North Korea, and there are competing elements.  Moreover, the young and women of Iran want to modernize the country.

Both U.S. presidential candidates should set forth a vision of their foreign policy toward Iran.  However, it is hard to believe that the current or a future Democratic Administration, which has appeased Iran for years, would have the resolve to embrace the Iranian people for purposes of regime change.

But Iran must be defanged — the world needs a second Iranian Revolution.

Frank Schell is a business strategy consultant and former senior vice president of the First National Bank of Chicago. He was a Lecturer at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago and is a contributor of opinion pieces to various journals.