Defeat the Iranian threat by empowering the people of Iran

The Hill-Dec4th2024

By Kenneth R. Timmerman, opinion contributor

The greatest overseas threat Donald Trump will face during his second term will not come from Russia, China, or even North Korea. It will come from the Islamic regime in Iran.

Russia, China, and even North Korea respect the rules of power politics and will respond to some blend of negotiation, coercion, and enticement to set aside — at least temporarily — their hostile intent toward America. In other words, they are ripe for the “art of the deal.

Islamic Iran is not.

Any idea that the mullahs in Tehran are ready to make a deal with President-elect Trump is profoundly mistaken. They do not chant “Death to America” at every public meeting just for the cameras. They believe that their regime will utterly destroy the United States, and they are planning each day how they can accomplish that end.

You could call it the death by a thousand cuts. Iranian regime agents murdered 241 U.S. Marines in the October 1983 bombing in Beirut. They covertly assisted the 9/11 hijackers who murdered 2,977 people in 2001. They killed another 600 U.S. soldiers in Iraq using explosively formed penetrators. And they have been accused by the FBI of having plotted to kill Trump himself.

So far, only one U.S. president has held them to account for their actions. When Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani was mobilizing Iraqi militias to storm the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Trump took action, ordering a drone strike on Soleimani in the early morning hours of Jan. 3, 2020.

According to Bob Woodward’s account in the book “Rage,” the president based his decision on intelligence intercepts. That may have been the way the intelligence community disguised the information provided to the president, but it came from human sources who had access to the Supreme Leader’s office — a story I reveal in “The Iran House.”

Trump understood at that time that allowing Soleimani to continue his attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad would do grave damage to the United States. And he was right.

Military force does have an effect on the Iranian regime’s behavior, but it is only temporary. They back off for a time, only to regroup and plot how to strike anew.

You cannot negotiate with a regime dedicated to your demise. They may temporarily change their behavior, but never their goals.

Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who boasts of his close ties to the Revolutionary Guards, claims his government is ready to negotiate a new nuclear agreement with the United States and our allies.

But Pezeshkian represents very little of the Iranian regime. As the presidential nominee selected by the Islamic elite, he is little more than a puppet in their hands. The regime is controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who rejected the 2015 nuclear deal until the very end to coerce Secretary of State John Kerry into greater concessions.

Neither of those powers wants a deal with the United States. Khamanei ideologically opposes dealing with the “Great Satan,” while Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps stands to lose its monopoly on the grey market oil trade with China, now averaging two million barrels of oil per day.

Secretary of State designee Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) got it just right when asked by NBC News whether a deal was possible with the Iranian regime.