E brahim Raisi, the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, died on May 19, along with the country’s foreign minister, a number of their bodyguards, and the pilot of their helicopter, which evidently crashed because of fog.
My grandmother — a tough but fair Missouri dairy farmer — had a comment appropriate to such occasions: “The Devil has a new companion.” In this case, the Devil has several new companions. It is a shame about the helicopter pilot though.
If the United States had a competent Middle Eastern policy, this would be an opportunity to increase American security in the region. Our government would have already been doing everything possible to weaken the Islamic Republic. Sanctions would have been biting the regime; its foreign reserves would have shrunk; its foreign assets would be frozen; oil sales would have slowed to a trickle; and the Abraham Accords would have already been successfully expanded to include more of the Gulf States. In addition, our leaders would have been isolating the regime internationally by highlighting its harsh repression of the Iranian people.
Had that been done, the United States would be positioned to exploit the instability that the death of Raisi will create in Tehran. Raisi was not only president but also the front-runner to replace the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who is 85 years old. Now that Raisi has gone to his reward, such as it is, the regime will have to find a new president while also deciding whether he or someone else will succeed Khamenei. That could set off a period of jockeying among the various factions that control the country, which will — unless the regime somehow contrives to prevent it — be followed by a rubber-stamp presidential election of the regime’s choice to replace Raisi.
The election will of course be stage managed and the outcome predetermined, but even a sham election is an opportunity for dissidents to leverage and grow the popular discontent which is always bubbling beneath the surface in Iran.
There may well be no government in the world more hated by its own people than the government of Iran. Iranians are a proud people with a rich history and a sophisticated knowledge of the world. It is therefore no surprise that the regime’s corruption, repression, and barbaric enforcement of sharia law have alienated almost everyone in Iran, except of course the most fanatical clerics, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and other regime insiders who have benefitted so greatly from stealing the nation’s wealth.
A competent American government would have a menu of options available to exploit the instability that is likely to threaten the regime in the coming months. Increasing sanctions, highlighting the regime’s abuse of women and gays, stronger military responses to the terrorist proxies that Tehran funds and directs — all would be on the table as possible tactics to pressure the regime and take advantage of the moment.
But you cannot operationalize a policy you do not have, and the Biden administration does not have a strategy to weaken or even contain the Islamic Republic. In fact, the opposite is true; the administration’s policy is to accommodate and appease the regime in the belief that it can thereby create a Middle Eastern equilibrium that includes the Islamic Republic.
Most Americans across the political spectrum understand instinctively that such an equilibrium is impossible — that it represents the most fantastic kind of wish-casting. Iran is an outlier in the Middle East. Its people are Persian and Shia Muslim; most of the rest of the region is Arab and majority Sunni. More to the point, the men who run the Islamic Republic are vicious fanatics who want to, and actually believe they can, overthrow the governments of their Muslim neighbors, impose their version of sharia law on the region, and trigger a global resurgence of radical Islam.
To that end, the regime has established and funded a network of proxy terror groups — twelve groups spread across six countries — through which it can threaten or attack its enemies in the Middle East, most decidedly including those members of the United States armed forces who are stationed in the Middle East.
Yet the Biden administration has made the incredible strategic blunder of treating the Islamic Republic as a potential partner rather than a deadly adversary; and when you make a mistake of that magnitude, on that high a level of policy, everything you do to implement the policy undermines your own interests.
It was therefore no surprise when the administration offered its condolences on Raisi’s death. In the years before that, the Biden team had delisted the Houthis (one of Iran’s proxies) from the list of terror groups, a decision it was forced to reverse this year after the group, to the surprise of absolutely nobody in the Middle East, escalated its attacks on commercial shipping. The administration also unfroze $6 billion of Iranian assets in Iraq and $10 billion in North Korea, and relaxed enforcement of sanctions on Iranian oil. As a result, Iranian foreign reserves increased by 46 percent, and oil exports have almost doubled and thereby delivered an additional $33–35 billion in revenue to the Islamic Republic.
All in all, Biden’s policy has enriched the regime by upwards of $50 billion, and it could have been worse: The administration reportedly had been prepared to give $80–130 billion of sanctions relief to Iran if the regime had signed the nuclear deal that Special Envoy Robert Malley was begging it to sign.
And why, given the administration’s strategic assumptions, shouldn’t it have given those gifts to Tehran? That is how you treat a country if you think it is, or could be, a strategic partner.
Naturally the regime has used every dollar of the money U.S. policy has provided it — except the portion stolen to personally enrich its leaders — to build up its own military, including its nuclear program, and empower its proxies to attack its enemies and destabilize the region.
Discerning readers will have noticed that I have not thus far mentioned Israel, or the Palestinians. Of course the leaders of the Islamic Republic want to destroy the Jewish state, but that is not their ultimate goal. Unlike the government of the United States, the Iranian regime actually has a comprehensive, long-term strategy to purify Islam and conquer the Middle East.
Destroying Israel would just be an intermediate step. As for the Palestinians, the leaders of Iran don’t give a tinker’s damn about them. The Palestinians are cannon fodder in the most comprehensive sense of the term: a people to be brainwashed and then made to suffer, so that their suffering can be leveraged on behalf of the greater cause, with the added amusing bonus that Iran’s enemies in the West — the United States and Western Europe — send aid to Palestine which Hamas can steal and divert to the personal and political benefit of Tehran and its proxies.
Even Lenin only thought that “the capitalists will sell us the rope we will use to hang them.” The Iranian regime has come to expect, not without reason, that the rope will arrive as a gift.
Four years ago in these pages, I wrote about the achievements of the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against the Islamic Republic. Trump’s Iran policy included some brilliant tactical moves. The Abraham Accords were one. Another was eliminating Qasem Soleimani — a low-risk, high-reward way both of restoring America’s credibility and sending a deterrent message to Tehran in a language that butchers like Raisi could and did understand.
But there was nothing brilliant about the maximum-pressure strategy itself. It was really just common sense. Donald Trump may not be a great foreign-policy theorist, but he is capable of distinguishing America’s enemies from its friends and partners.
Unfortunately, his successor isn’t. Ebrahim Raisi’s death may well cause a lot of trouble for the regime in the coming months, but it won’t be because of the Biden administration. The people of Iran are on their own.