SULAYMANIYAH, Iraqi Kurdistan — Iran's currency is in free-fall, falling almost 10% over the weekend, breaking through the psychologically important half-million mark to more than 600,000 rials to the dollar. The plunging currency led the Tehran bazaar to close, an event that preceded the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Just a few dozen miles across the border, Iraqi Kurds were watching developments closely, questioning how quickly the rial rate could fall below 1 million and the consequences.
The situation is quickly becoming a perfect storm for Iran. Nowruz, the Persian New Year, is less than a month away. During the holiday, Iranians visit friends, family, and take pride in lavishing hospitality. The rule of supply and demand normally leads to modest inflation of basic foodstuffs during the period. While Nowruz always falls on the same day, Ramadan follows the Islamic calendar. This year, it coincides with Nowruz. Holiday inflation will be supercharged. Not since the Iran-Iraq War will Iranians feel so squeezed. The result — either no hospitality or unaffordable debt— will demoralize.
When leader Ali Khamenei likes to talk about revolutionary values, most Iranians roll their eyes. Just as in the last months of the Soviet Union, even regime apparatchiks no longer believe their own talking points. The protests that began with 22-year-old Mahsa Amini’s death in police custody was a death knell to regime legitimacy. That the six-month anniversary of her death falls on Nowruz takes the perfect storm to an even higher level. Inertia and fear now hold the Islamic Republic together. But that may no longer be enough. While Iranian bureaucrats may no longer be true believers (if they ever were), they embraced the status quo to keep their jobs and their salaries. They may have jobs, but their salaries may no longer be enough to subsist.
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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s strategy of maximum pressure was right. President Joe Biden’s team might also claim credit by cracking down on Iraqi transfers of cash to Iran, after two years of doing the opposite. In effect, they now seem to embrace Pompeo’s strategy after trying everything else first.
Zombie regimes can persist for months, if not years, but change is now inevitable. It is time to plan for regime change in Iran. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush issued a classified national security directive instructing all elements of the U.S. government to prepare for normalization with Iran. Iranians were never an enemy; they were as much victims of the Islamic Republic as were Americans. Rather than imagine reconciliation with the Iranian regime, it is time to gear policy fully to the possibilities of a Middle East in which Iran is a partner for peace and stability rather than a source of division, terrorism, and violence.
Let us hope that Biden understands what the Iranian people now do: That future is not possible with the Islamic Republic in existence.
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Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.