Iran has reportedly started shipping ballistic missiles to Russia to use against Ukraine, adding to its destabilizing weapons trafficking portfolio of terrorists, oppressive regimes, cartels, and aggressor states.
Iran’s lethal trade is aimed mostly at Israel, other free nations, and against opponents to authoritarian leaders or military juntas that can provide sanctions-free income streams to Tehran for arms, oil, gas, training, intelligence, and more.
Iran has of late, supplied aggression against Ukraine, Israel, Red Sea shipping crews, Iraq, U.S. troops, impoverished Syrians, Venezuelan citizens, Yemenis, and Saudi Arabia among others. It has sponsored terrorist plots and traded with criminal cartels that cause harm worldwide.
Iran has promised a second major attack on Israel after having launched a first massive missile, rocket, and drone attack intercepted by Israel’s allies and its air defense forces. This, after Hamas’ 9-11-equivalent terrorist attack on Israel of October 7, 2023 killing over 1,200 Israelis, including civilians, and taking hostages. Since the Hamas October 7th attacks on Israel, Iran’s proxy Hezbollah and related terror groups continue to fire rockets on Israeli civilians and Israeli Defense Forces from Lebanon, provoking a wider war. Iran has also harbored wanted Hamas terrorists since October 7 terror attacks even as Hamas has held Israel civilians hostage, killing a number of them.
Decades of Chaos and Terror
Iran’s regime has supplied, trained, and or provided intelligence to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, the Houthis, Shi’ite militias in Iraq and Syria, Sudanese civil warring factions and recent African coup leaders, and to Russia in its terroristic war on Ukraine.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) have trained Shi’ite militias in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon and have likely participated in rocket attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. The attack on the U.S. airbase in Jordan brought U.S. retaliation on 84 Iran-backed militia and IRGC targets.
Evidence amassed in the years after 9-11 indicates that the Iran regime has appeased, hosted, helped rebuild, and worked with Al-Qaeda, and there is evidence that the Iranian regime at some level laundered (concealed) al-Qaeda’s 9-11 terrorists‘ (Hamburg Cell members) flights into and out of Iran via Tehran Airport in 2001.
Nothing Has Worked to Meaningfully Civilize the Islamist Regime
No “realpolitik,” diplomacy, sanctions, lawyerly deals, seized money returned, or law enforcement activity has worked to stop Iran’s revolutionary Islamist regime from winning the top terror sponsor spot for many years since it inception. The Congressional Research Service last month charted Iran’s terror network in the Mideast and Levant, as mapped out below:
Iran has become an unaccountable profiteer, instigator, and supplier of mass human death and instability in seven major geopolitical regions: the Levant, Middle East, Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and North America.
With the Yemen-based Houthi terror sponsorship, Iran has extended its terror proxy warfare not only against Saudi Arabia but onto the high seas against free trading nations’ shipping crews to try to hold the world’s commerce hostage to save the Hamas terror organization it trained, supplied, and supported before Hamas perpetrated October 7th.
Not content to terrorize its own hemisphere only, via its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, Iran has also partnered with organized crime in Latin America to prop up the Maduro regime in Venezuela so that dictator Nicolas Maduro can stay in power to secure Iran’s cash flow arms business (citing Financial Nexus of Terrorism, Drug Trafficking, and Organized Crime, Subcommittee of Terrorism and Illicit Finance, US House of Representatives (2018) (testimony of Joseph M. Humire), https://financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/03.20.2018_joseph_humire_testimony.pdf). Indeed, the Maduro regime has been harassing and hunting its political opposition, emboldened by Moscow and Tehran.
Iran Enabled Will Only Get Worse
Iran uses its ties to Russia and China to render western sanctions ineffective. Russia and China thus sponsor terrorism through Iran, one of the most prolific terror sponsors and actors in the world.
Given the above, the continuous efforts of Iran’s Islamist revolutionary regime at becoming a nuclear armed state drives risks of wider warfare up to and including risk factors for world war. While Iran alone cannot incite world war, the forces it provokes, enables, and unleashes are escalatory factors that could.
In July, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken suggested Iran was only 2 weeks away from having enough nuclear grade material to use to build a nuclear device, although it is not clear if Iran could field a nuclear-tipped missile. An AP report on September 4th cited U.S. intelligence findings from over the summer that Iran is close to having the fissionable material to build a nuclear device, yet if it did, it would likely be years away from miniaturizing and fielding it on a missile, much less on an accurate missile. None of this comforts Israel or Saudi Arabia, both in the crosshairs of Iran’s revolutionary regime. According to a CriticalThreats.org report, senior Iranian officials since early 2024 have made statements tending “to normalize discussions about Iran’s ability to procure nuclear weapons.”
Adding to global uncertainty in this situation is the fact that Russia and China were responsible for nuclear technology proliferation to Pakistan and North Korea. If nuclear weapons and missile technology proliferates to Iran from China, Russia, North Korean or Pakistan, Iran will use its energy revenues to build a nuclear arsenal. To whom might revolutionary Islamist Iran then proliferate its nuclear devices? Hezbollah? Hamas? Al-Qaeda?
If Iran’s regime merely sought deterrence with nuclear weapons, with an interest only to be left alone as some say, the regime would not be externally, ideologically, and militantly revolutionary. And yet it is.
Who Would Take Over if Regime Change Came to Iran
Iranians, especially the younger generations, are ready for change as the character of their theocracy has grown stale, proven false, and has presided over continuous setbacks for the country due to revolutionary adventurism abroad. Hence, a trend toward secularization in Iran for over a decade. Still, for Iran’s majority, ‘ready for change’ must equal ‘ready to take charge and lead” if newer generations would win and hold independence.
Financial Times reported that the Islamist regime is preparing its own minority cadre of young fanatics to compete for future control and influence with their counterparts in the restive young Iranian population. However, being outnumbered by a determined, supported majority would be hard to overcome for a new generation of fanatics. Given the police state Iran had become, catalytic events will likely be needed for the majority to take charge and remake the government.
Strategic, Multilateral Shift in Iran Policy Overdue To Catalyze and Support Iran’s Popular Liberation
The Iran problem is not Iran, or the Iranian people. It is the line of revolutionary Islamist regimes headed by a dictator called the Supreme Leader, that have built a cult of personality and hatred rooted in perpetual religious governmental pressure. The Supreme Leader is protected by cadres of the IRGC estimated at about 150,000 strong whose ever present threat discourages the questioning of authority. The IRGC enables the theocratic dictatorship to keep control over the rest of the military, government, intelligence, police, and secret police institutions. The corrupt monetary networks and terror proxies willing to die for the Supreme Leader and his revolutionary power structure feed the cycle of authoritarianism, terrorism, poverty, and strife.
The terror sponsoring regime over Iran has a mutually energizing relationship with the despotic regime in Moscow. That relationship must be broken if the Iranian people would be free, Ukraine and the E.U. would remain free, Israel survive, Nordic countries stand strong, and the U.K. avoid being isolated twice in two centuries by a despotic axis closing in on Europe. These are all good reasons to help catalyze freedom for the Iranian people.
Strategic Concepts for How Liberation Might Happen in Iran: Catalyze and Support
Operation Praying Mantis of April 1988 was a prototype of what many believe should happen again to Iran’s military on a large scale to stop Tehran’s 45-year reign of terror and destabilization.
How large the scale of warfare will actually be rests on how much support for the autocratic regime there is in the Iranian military and IRGC forces on the unknown day of engagement. It would make no sense to engage the entire Iranian military if it was not itself going to fully engage to support the regime. For a better future with less to rebuild, it would make sense for IRGC leaders to rethink fighting a war against a free nation coalition that has fewer limitations on what scale of military force it can bring relative to their own limits.
During Praying Mantis, preparations were made that the response be proportional to the mine strike on the USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58) to ‘avoid civilian casualties and collateral damage, limit adverse environmental effects.’ Similar measures to win hearts and minds in the greater population of Iran could be at the ready, however, Iran’s forces today cannot be approached as they were in April 1988. The same or similar advantage must be prepared for today’s reality which will not resemble 1988.
Interestingly, during Operation Praying Mantis, nine years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and hostage taking in Tehran that ushered in a more hawkish, muscular foreign policy advocate in President Ronald Reagan, a significant number of Iranian personnel on targeted platforms that were warned in advance by the U.S. Navy to quit the areas targeted for destruction, did so. Over the next 35 years, enthusiasm for the revolutionary Islamist terror sponsorship, wars on Sunni neighbors, and target-fixation on Israel has likely declined across many sectors of Iranian society, including the IRGC. How many would stand down today?
It is not certain how many units would stand down as IRGC members would never publicly telegraph this. So while preparations to end the reign of terror of the 45-year extremist regime would have to be equipped with overwhelming force to defeat the entire Iranian military if necessary, the capability of communicating with and monitoring credible stand down behavior by Iranian units must be part of that capability.
It is reasonably possible that the scale of action may exclude targeting of the entire Iranian military should substantial numbers of units stand down. The focus of resources will of necessity come down on hardliner elements, those actively resisting, and it is more likely these will be from the ranks of the IRGC and extremist proxies in-country and abroad. The regime’s loyal intelligence, secret police, and religious enforcement apparatuses in and outside of Iran would require disarmament, dismantlement, and disposition according to their history of treatment of Iranian citizens.
IRGC members that credibly stand down could earn the right to actively aid in the formation new Iranian Defense Forces loyal to the newly formed provisional government tasked with establishing free and fair elections for all Iranians. In such a government, actively serving religious clerics should be barred from holding government office for obvious reasons.
In light of today’s weaponry and capabilities, a Praying Mantis sequel would be better handled as a multilateral, multi-services stand-off effort utilizing a set of combined methods, timing, and capabilities to precisely dismantle the Iranian dictatorship’s imperial control complex and its hold on Iran’s instruments of power.
If one considers the former Yugoslav Serbian armed forces as an opposition model for Iran’s IRGC, Yugoslav forces in 1999 were some 115,000 strong and IRGC forces 150,000 strong today. The Yugoslav armed forces surrendered after a sustained, persistent stand-off bombing campaign using mostly precision strikes. Possibly, IRGC could likewise be defeated.
Given the nuclear risk, such a multilateral operation would also need to deal with the Iran dictatorship’s nuclear weapons program. Iran’s revolutionary regime has repeatedly proven its untrustworthiness by its return to terror, war, crime, and aggressive militancy. Nuclear weapons status would only embolden this apocalyptic trend.
And a note on timing: the Iranian regime has shown recent restraint in reacting to Israel’s draconian campaign to eliminate Hamas as if Tehran is waiting for some kind of support, permission, diversion, or finished project. Thus, time should be considered of the essence regarding the dismantlement which may well already have been started by the regime itself.
It is not the duty of multilateral free countries victimized by Islamist revolutionary Iran over the decades to occupy Iran and guide regime change. It is enough to catalyze it with overwhelming force, precision, and decisive supply to those in Iran fighting for the newer generation leadership, their sympathetic elders, and some long exiled expats willing to help establish freedom governance in Iran and after that, sane relations with the world.
It would be up to those fighting for independence to stay unified and keep power by reforming society, disarming the extremists and extremism, arresting extreme clerics, establishing religious freedom, and repurposing the Iranian military to serve the defense of the Iranian people, not to export Islamic revolution.
The members of the former theocracy should be left for the Iranian people to decide their fate if possible, however, as they are surrounded by militant elements that must be eliminated for Iranians to be safe and free, their collateral damage is a risk.
The IRGC, its Quds force, Hezbollah, and related proxy militias and terrorists on Iran’s payroll would need to be thoroughly and continuously hunted down to degrade their numbers, break them, starve their finances, and keep them running until they collapse. They will see a significant drop in their financing as the Iranian regime ceases to function and loses control over instruments of power.
Finally, the concept of multilateral “dismantlement” of extremist, fanatical revolutionary Iran and its regional elements requires updated multidisciplinary adaptations that must not be telegraphed.
Where China Should Stand as the West Shapes the Winds of Change
And in this free nation policy shift, China should likely prefer to abstain from involvement or interference other than protest at the UN, for China, on its own reflection, will not want a nuclear Tehran proliferating nuclear devices or material to the Taliban, Uighers, or Pakistani extremists mounting a revolution. One wonders if the communist party has failed to remind Xi Jinping that China is not traditionally a friend of revolutionary, expansionist Islamist regimes or religious groups in general, as was evident in Tibet and Xinjiang. Why would it embrace a nuclear Shi’ite Islamist caliphate and why would Tehran trust China?
Caveat: If the U.S., U.K., and E.U. dither in delivering decisive aid to Ukraine to bring the Russian campaign of aggression to an end, it will be harder than ever to remove the extremist vanguard in Tehran, and may well spell the end of Israeli national security. At that point, preceded by the sabotage of the exit from Afghanistan and the resigned go-along with same, American influence will be done.
No U.S. Administration that would buy time to transition from global leader to secure superpower in a chaotic world will accept an exit strategy as the world’s policeman that is a strategy of weakness. Therefore, the United States must dispense with the world policeman role and adopt a free nation superpower role that prevents the necessity of police actions by dedicating full commitment to total victory at war when war is truly necessary or a real risk, and arrangement of alternate, hybrid multilateral solutions when it will not remove barriers to the solution of a stubborn problem impacting U.S. national security. Responding for one’s own national security’s sake is not “police action.”
In our estimation, Iran’s revolutionary Islamist regime is a barrier to the solution to the stubbornly recurrent problem of its export of terrorism, instability and traumatic suffering that seed tomorrow’s war.
Pressure Point in Rebalancing Power in the Middle East and Eastern Hemisphere
It is likely that future U.S. and Israeli relations with Iraq’s Sunnis and Turkey’s government will improve with the removal of the extreme regime in Tehran, opening a new role for a freer Tehran, Baghdad, Riyadh, and Ankara to remake Middle East security.
Another fringe benefit of an end to the extremist Iranian regime would be removal of a provocative extreme on the other side of the Sunni-Shi’a divide driving recruitment for Sunni extremist groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda.
In this and many other ways, Iran’s regime is a pressure point for rebalancing international stability at the crossroads of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Stability in the Middle East enhances security and prosperity in the Eastern Hemisphere. This feeds back into energy-to-diversity prosperity for Middle East nations and more realistically delivers the “peaceful development” China says it wants for its own Belt and Road initiative (source Global Times, Chinese official state news).
