When a government feels the need to repeatedly shut off the internet to silence its own people, it exposes its most crippling insecurity: citizens who can freely speak to one another and the global community. That, more than drone strikes or foreign armies, terrifies the clerical state in Iran. The United States, therefore, does not need soldiers on Iranian soil to influence Iran’s future. It needs an unflinching policy of supporting the Iranian people, keeping the lines of communication open, and amplifying Iranian voices that are already demanding change.
Recent American memory is crowded with debacles in Baghdad, Kabul, and Benghazi, and that catalogue of failure understandably feeds public skepticism about any talk of regime change. Iran, however, is not Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya. The country has a century‑long history of constitutionalism, a sophisticated bureaucracy, and a shared national identity that long predate the Islamic Republic. Those dormant institutions and that cohesive civic culture are the foundation on which a post‑theocratic Iran could stand. The question is whether Washington will treat Iran’s inevitable uprising as the next chapter in Middle Eastern chaos or as the 21st‑century analogue to the revolutions that swept across Eastern Europe during the fall of Communism in the late 80s and early 90s. (RELATED: Leaders of the Free World: We’ve Been at War With Iran Since 1979)
In Iran, the desire for freedom is unmistakable, and the institutional memory of republican governance is intact.
This distinction is not academic. Iran’s protest movement is emphatically domestic. Millions of Iranians have risked their livelihoods and their lives, shouting the slogan “woman, life, freedom” in the face of live ammunition. They are not asking for the 82nd Airborne. They are asking for bandwidth, moral solidarity, and the diplomatic pressure that can weaken the security organs that keep the Supreme Leader in power. In other words, they are asking for help to become the very thing the regime fears most: a connected, informed, and mobilized populace.
Washington possesses every tool necessary to meet that request without firing a shot. Regulations can be written to ensure that satellite‑based internet platforms like Starlink reach Iranian homes. Sanctions can be tightened on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps while simultaneously offering credible amnesty to rank‑and‑file conscripts who refuse to fire on civilians. The State Department can turn every diplomatic pulpit into a loudspeaker for the stories of Iranian women who tear off compulsory hijabs and of trade unionists who shut down petrochemical plants.
The United States and its European partners should welcome and protect defections from the regime’s security forces and use frozen regime assets to establish a labor‑strike fund to subsidize workers who walk off the job in strategic industries. Shielding defectors and sustaining striking employees would multiply the pressure points on a regime already weakened by corruption and mismanagement.
None of this constitutes foreign-imposed regime change; it is the diplomatic equivalent of handing a megaphone to a crowd that has already gathered while marking a safe off-ramp for the guards ordered to silence them.
Skeptics warn that outside support could taint the movement, handing the regime a ready‑made propaganda line about foreign puppets. That concern would be persuasive if Iranians themselves were not begging for precisely this brand of engagement. From exiled activists to students in Shiraz to factory workers in Esfahan, Iranians have pleaded for Washington to keep pressure on the regime and to provide maximum support to the public. The policy they want is less Battle of Normandy, more Berlin Airlift.
A post‑Islamic Republic Iran would also begin its reconstruction with advantages that Iraq, Syria, and Libya never enjoyed. The country’s large diaspora is one of the most highly educated in the world, spanning Silicon Valley, the European academy, and the international civil service. Those expatriates would serve as a bridge to global capital and to the rule‑making institutions that anchor the liberal order, offering technical know‑how and investment once conditions permit.
Inside Iran, literacy now almost exceeds 90 percent, and youth literacy is near-universal; university enrollment has climbed above 60 percent, higher than the global average and comparable to European countries, and a culture of entrepreneurship continues to thrive. These human assets cannot solve every post‑revolution problem, but they make state collapse far less likely than societies fractured by sectarianism or lacking a substantial middle class.
The Iranian opposition also enjoys a distinct advantage: the presence of a unifying historical figure, Reza Pahlavi, whose popularity stems from his being both a democratic and nationalist figure, transcending ethnic and political divisions. Unlike opposition movements in many Middle Eastern countries, Iran’s revolutionary momentum benefits from a coherent leadership figure with a plan to facilitate a peaceful transition and reassure both domestic and international observers.
None of this is to suggest that tectonic change in Iran will be neat or bloodless. The regime has shown it will massacre schoolgirls rather than relinquish power. Yet the status quo is hardly peaceful. Tehran funds proxy wars from Gaza to Beirut, it ships drones to Russia for use against Ukrainian civilians, and it teeters on the threshold of a nuclear weapon.
The Islamic Republic has long subordinated Iran’s welfare to its own quest for regional hegemony and ideological export, bankrolling militias abroad while strangling opportunity at home. A democratic Iran would actually pursue Iran’s real national interests, forced to justify those interests to voters who suffer when missile adventures invite sanctions and isolation. That accountability alone would make the Middle East safer.
Critics may still invoke the ghosts of past interventions, but the lesson of those failures is not that the United States must remain forever passive. It is that any attempt to reorder another society must align with the desires of that society and must rely on indigenous institutions rather than imported blueprints. In Iran, the desire for freedom is unmistakable, and the institutional memory of republican governance is intact. To pretend otherwise is to indulge a fatalism that serves only the ayatollahs.
Congress and the White House should declare, in unison, that the United States will stand with the Iranian people until they can speak, organize, and vote without fear. They can codify that promise by passing the Maximum Support Act, which affirms that it is the policy of the United States to provide maximum support to the people of Iran in their desire to bring about a new political system in Iran based upon democracy, human rights, and the rule of law for all citizens of Iran.
Tehran is not Baghdad, Benghazi, or Kabul. Iran is ready for democracy. The question is whether America is ready, at no financial cost and zero military risk, to help Iranians seize the future their rulers deny them.
Andrew Ghalili is a senior policy analyst at the National Union for Democracy in Iran (NUFDI). Tymahz Toumadje is a policy analyst at NUFDI.
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