Donald Trump just nudged Iranian regime closer to oblivion it deserves

On Saturday, thousands of Iranian expatriates will gather in Paris at a rally to mark the 46th anniversary of the Shah’s overthrow and to highlight the prospects of a similar end to ’s present dictatorship.

Hope for regime change was bolstered in advance of the rally when, on Tuesday, President signed a memorandum directing the US Treasury Department to rescind sanctions waivers, as part of the reimplementation of his previous administration’s strategy of “Maximum Pressure” on the Iranian regime.

The rally’s participants will no doubt applaud this move. Iran’s democratic opposition movement has long urged all Western governments to pursue more assertive policies toward the Islamic Republic. Indeed, the rally is expected to press for an escalation of Maximum Pressure to something that may be termed “Maximum Pressure Plus”.

As it stands, the US administration’s stated goal is to reduce Iran’s oil exports to zero, as a step toward cutting off “all paths to a nuclear weapon” and curtailing “Iran’s malign influence” in the surrounding region and wider world. But, as Iranian Resistance leader Maryam Rajavi has made clear in recent remarks to her supporters and to legislators in both the US and , the clerical regime will do everything in its power to oppose that goal, because compromising on any of its malign activities is tantamount to acknowledging defeat for its theocratic system.

“The regime’s defeats in the region have been severe,” Rajavi said last month at a conference in . She went on to note that, though the regime will find it difficult to recover from multiple reverses such as the overthrow of its key state proxy, Bashar al-Assad, the fact remains that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “will neither stop suppressing the Iranian people, nor abandon his nuclear weapons programme, nor reconsider his regional warmongering.”

Rajavi, as head of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), has consistently argued that the only way of permanently halting those malign activities is by facilitating the Iranian people’s overthrow of Khamenei’s dictatorship. Speakers at Saturday’s rally will surely echo that sentiment and emphasise that recent and continuing developments in Iran make it clear that that overthrow is well within reach, and that the US and its allies have an historic opportunity to help achieve it.

This is not a call for direct intervention in Iran’s domestic affairs; far from it. The NCRI and its supporters welcome Tuesday’s executive order because it is very close to what they have advocated for years, though it falls short by failing formally to acknowledge the Iranian people’s organised, pro-democracy opposition movement. This is an especially glaring oversight, given that in 2022 Iranians from all walks of life banded together under the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” and brought the regime to the very brink of collapse.

Tehran has been struggling to keep a lid on further popular unrest ever since. And despite the regime killing 750 people during the initial uprising, arresting 30,000 others, and pursuing a broader, brutal response that resulted in more than 1,000 death sentences in 2024 alone, anti-government sentiment remains prevalent throughout Iranian society. As Rajavi also said in last month’s conference, that sentiment has been channelled into increased activity by a network of “Resistance Units” affiliated to the NCRI’s principal constituent group, the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran, as part of “wider preparations” for a new uprising aimed at toppling the regime.

Iranian activists are confident in the ability of the people and their Resistance movement to achieve that outcome by their own efforts and without external direct intervention. There is good reason for Western policymakers to share that confidence, and many of them already do. Thousands of US congressmen and British and European parliamentarians have long endorsed the NCRI as the most viable alternative to the clerical regime and recognised the progress that Resistance Units have already made toward implementation of Mrs. Rajavi’s ten-point plan for a free, democratic, and non-nuclear republic of Iran.

Formal government policies have yet to reflect that confidence, but, with Maximum Pressure Plus, the Trump administration may soon change that. In practical terms, doing so would hardly be different from what the President announced on Tuesday. It would, however, reflect a formal commitment to exert economic and diplomatic pressure on the Iranian regime with the specific aim of amplifying the internal pressure already being exerted by a beleaguered but resilient population.

That population is hungry for democratic change and is prepared to seize it as soon as it feels there is sufficient support from the international community.