In a speech on Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that the United States will “crush” Iran with a new package of economic, diplomatic, military, and cyber pressures if it does not accept sweeping changes to its policies at home and abroad. The new U.S. policy laid out a dozen new demands that put the Trump Administration on a collision course with the Iranian government—and falls rhetorically short only of supporting an uprising by the Iranian people. “At the end of the day, the Iranian people will decide the timeline,” Pompeo said, when asked how the new policy would play out. “At the end of the day, the Iranian people will get to make a choice about their leadership. If they make the decision quickly, that would be wonderful. If they choose not to do so, we will stay hard at this until we achieve the outcomes that I set forward today.”
The Trump Administration will more aggressively confront Iranian operatives and their allies in Lebanon’s Hezbollah operating around the world, Pompeo vowed. The Islamic Republic “will never again have carte blanche to dominate the Middle East.” A new package of sanctions, still to be unveilled, will impose “unprecedented financial pressures”—the strongest in history—on Tehran, Pompeo said, at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. Iran “should know that this is just the beginning.”
The Administration did hold out the option of full diplomatic and commercial reconciliation with the Islamic Republic—if it agreed to all twelve demands for “tangible, demonstrated, and sustained shifts” in policies. The demands ranged from ending military aid to Middle East militias and closing down its ballistic-missile program to permanently abandoning uranium enrichment and releasing all foreign detainees. “We didn’t create the list,” Pompeo said. “They did.”
But the tenor of the speech challenged the revolutionary regime itself as it approaches its fortieth anniversary, next February. “At this milestone, we have to ask: What has the Iranian revolution given the Iranian people?” Pompeo, who has led the State Department for less than a month, said. “The regime reaps a harvest of suffering and death in the Middle East at the expense of its people.” Pompeo said the United States stands “in total solidarity” with the regime’s “longest-suffering victims: its own people.”
Pompeo also assailed the “fatal flaws” of the 2015 nuclear agreement, brokered by the Obama Administration over two years of intense negotiations. He said the deal “merely delayed the inevitable nuclear-weapons capability” that he said Iran was developing, and that the pact put the “world at risk.”
In Tehran, President Hassan Rouhani rebuffed the United States. “Who are you to decide for the world?” he told the Iranian media. “Last year, we promised that we wouldn’t return back to the way things were, and we didn’t. But today, a government is in office in the United States that returned their country fifteen years back overnight and is repeating the same words of 2003 and 2004,” he said.
The strategy leaves the United States at odds with the five other major powers—Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia—that were equal partners to the nuclear accord, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the most significant non-proliferation agreement in more than a quarter century. The five other major powers have committed to adhering to the deal, with the European Union considering legislation that will nullify the effects of U.S. sanctions on foreign companies that continue doing business with Iran. The new U.S. strategy does, however, reflect the ambitions of key U.S. allies in the Middle East, notably Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
The speech was both cheered and jeered in the Washington foreign-policy community. “It was a diplomatic overreach, to say the least,” Wendy Sherman, who led the Obama Administration’s negotiating team with Iran, told me. “To think that we’d allow Iran to go back on the path of developing nuclear weapons while we try to get Iran to meet all twelve objectives is dangerous. It’s extraordinary. The underlying objective is to tell the Iranian people, ‘You can overthrow your government.’ ”
The prospect of Iran acceding to all twelve demands, Sherman added, “is virtually zero. What Trump did will actually make it harder to achieve.” The strategy will also allow Tehran to blame the United States if the economy deteriorates. Trump’s threats since December to abandon the nuclear accord have helped cause the rial, Iran’s currency, to lose a third of its value.
Others called the new strategy an imaginative blend of maximum pressure and maximum diplomacy. “The U.S. put a lot on the table if Iran ends its malign activities, including the restoration of full diplomatic and economic relations,” Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told me. “It’s a big offer, with an opportunity for a big diplomatic breakthrough that benefits the Iranian people and the U.S.”
The most controversial implication of Pompeo’s speech is that the Administration would ultimately prefer regime change to reëngagement with the Islamic Republic. The secretary appealed to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a hard-liner, to “summon the courage to do something historically beneficial” for his people. But he also strongly condemned President Rouhani, a centrist who won office, in 2013, pledging to engage with the United States. Noting the protests over the economic crisis and women’s rights since December, Pompeo made it clear that the Administration sides with Iran’s “struggling people.”
Assessments of the regime’s longevity have shifted among Iran experts in Washington over the past six months. “Tens of thousands of people have been on the streets over the past few months yelling ‘Death to the dictator’ and demanding fundamental changes in the way they’re ruled,” Dubowitz said. “Is there anybody that wants this regime to stay in power? Certainly, the Iranian people themselves have made it clear that they want a transition to a democratic government that honors their aspirations.”
But the Administration’s strategy is also being challenged by those who believe the revolution has failed abysmally. They contend that a hodgepodge of approaches will not work. “Pompeo has not outlined a strategy, but rather a grab bag of wishful thinking that can only be interpreted as a call for regime change in Iran,” Suzanne Maloney, a former State Department policy-planning staffer who advised the George W. Bush Administration on Iran policy, wrote on Twitter on Monday. Maloney said she supports regime change in Iran. “I just don’t think it will happen at the barrel of a gun or in response to US diktat.”
The new U.S. strategy “is no longer about Trump fulfilling campaign promises or trying to satisfy his own ego re: a ‘bigger, better deal,’ ” she added. “It’s his infantile approach to foreign policy that purports to solve intractable challenges through the application of maximalist pressure.”
The speech lacked specifics in many areas, namely how the Administration will mobilize key players in the global economy to side with it in punishing Iran. Pompeo’s Iran strategy is “basically sanctions on steroids, and appealing to the Iranian public,” Dennis Ross, who worked for five Republican and Democratic Administrations and is now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, tweeted. “True the public is alienated from the regime but the US visa policy also alienates them. And sanctions can only work if truly international. Will we have such a coalition?”
In Tehran, the foreign minister replied to Pompeo’s speech on Twitter. “US diplomacy sham is merely a regression to old habits: imprisoned by delusions & failed policies,” he wrote, adding that Tehran was working with the five other countries that signed the 2015 nuclear accord in order to save it. But the challenges that the accord faces have grown since Trump withdrew the United States, on May 8th. Pessimism among the remaining signatories regarding its long-term fate is growing as well. The British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, said the U.S. plan for a “new jumbo Iran negotiation, a new treaty” is “very difficult” to achieve “in anything like a reasonable timescale.” A key envoy involved in the deal told me that his reaction to Pompeo’s speech was “a silence full of anxiety, disbelief, and sadness.”
