This move towards normalisation and cooperation culminated in recent years in the Abraham Accords, the transformative peace agreement which establishes an influential and productive bloc of economic partnership in the Middle East and serves to stabilise regional and world security.
Why world security? Because the ambitions of the Islamic Republic are by no means limited to their corner of the world. Americans along with other inhabitants of the free democracies need to understand what Arab and Muslim nations have been trying to tell us for years: the Islamic Republic will stop at nothing to attain their goals of disruption, subversion, and domination. To this end, we have seen global coordination on the propaganda front at a shocking level between the foreign actors whose interests are currently aligned in a fundamentally anti-Western manner. The Islamic Republic is directly coordinating with Russia and China to back Hamas. They are also working with Russia to evade American sanctions, provide support to the Houthis, and deliver military equipment to Hezbollah.
In concert with such activity, the Islamic Republic is actively and effectively sowing chaos and discord in America and elsewhere. If Israel is a thorn in the side of the mad mullahs of Tehran, America is a gigantic redwood whose rootedness in the tradition of human rights and freedoms remains the greatest obstacle to the dominion of radical Islamist ideology. Iran does not have the military prowess or might to wage war directly with America and her allies. Their goal, instead, is to destabilise us from within, and they make clever use of the technologies and freedoms that typify the West to do so.
Aiming for maximum chaos, they fuel the flames on both sides. On the right, they hack the Republican presidential campaign. On the Left, they fund protestors and influencers who shout, “Death to America” and “We Are Hamas,” all too often without understanding whose interests they are genuinely furthering. Islamic Republic operatives have attacked Western infrastructure, seeking to destroy our energy, water, and healthcare systems using the novel tactics of cyberwarfare.
They collaborate with domestic criminal networks to threaten their critics on American and European soil. Far and away their most effective strategy, however, is the PSYOPs campaigns waged through our ubiquitous social media platforms. Their manipulations are deployed covertly, aided by social media anonymity and weaponised through secret algorithms that profit off outrage, hate, and polarisation. The Islamic Republic’s plan to radicalise the West on social media has enjoyed particularly stunning success with more youthful citizens.
Young people who get their news primarily through TikTok hold opinions far outside the norm when it comes to America, Israel, and Jews. American women between the ages of 18-34 have an unfavourable view of America of more than 50% above the norm. Their ideas about Israel and Jews follow suit. Members of this demographic rely on TikTok to a much more extreme degree than others. The dire effects this produces are no mere accident: Iran, partnering with Russia, and China, has been waging a covert war through platforms such as TikTok to weaponise antisemitism and to destabilise America and the West – not least through promulgation of the victim/oppressor narrative which holds that every human and institutional relationship is governed by power alone.