Iran’s evil regime knows its days are now numbered for one very simple reason

President Trump on Tuesday moved to re-implement the “maximum pressure” strategy that had defined his policies toward the Islamic Republic of during his first term. It is the right decision at the right time.

It will no doubt take time for the new version of that strategy to take shape, but when it does, given the urgency and gravity of the problem, we should hope that it will go well beyond the limits of what has already been attempted. In fact, the White House might even consider a new name to reflect that escalation.

As it stands, Trump is directing the Treasury Department to rescind existing waivers of sanctions on the Iranian regime, with the aim of bringing its oil exports to zero. In this way, the president intends to exert enough pressure on that regime to bring a definitive end to its nuclear ambitions and to largely obstruct its malign influence throughout the world.

But the administration must not underestimate the resistance that Tehran will put up against all efforts to make it change its ways. And it must recognize that if real change is to come to Iran, it will come not from the top down, but from pressure exerted by the Iranian people themselves.

This reality was outlined in detail last month by Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of National Council of Resistance of Iran at a conference in .

Rajavi emphasized that the cleric regime’s malign activities, including its nuclear provocations and its violent suppression of domestic activists, are fundamental to its strategy for keeping hold of power. Its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, she said, “will neither stop suppressing the Iranian people, nor abandon his nuclear weapons program, nor reconsider his regional warmongering,” despite a cascade of serious defeats the regime suffered just last year.

Those include the further cratering of Iran’s economy, major setbacks to the regional proxies and threatening international shipping in the , and the overthrow of a key ally in Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. This has left the regime’s so-called Axis of Resistance severely fractured, while also leaving the regime itself more vulnerable to pressure from both domestic and foreign sources – perhaps more vulnerable than it has ever been.

Still, to properly exploit that vulnerability, domestic and foreign pressures should be applied in tandem. That means the expansion of economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure should be coupled with open endorsement of those forces inside the Islamic Republic pushing for regime change and democratic reform. Mrs. Rajavi’s recent speech emphasized that those forces are highly active and increasingly popular among the Iranian people as a whole, and are poised to implement a concrete plan for freeing their country from Islamist dictatorship.

Those plans, as well as all prior progress toward them, will no doubt be underscored for international audiences on Saturday, when Paris plays host to a rally of thousands of Iranian expatriates and other supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran. The event is also certain to echo the call for recognition of the fact that regime change is the only definitive, permanent solution to any of the crises now emanating from Tehran.

For the better part of the 46 years since the present Iranian regime seized power, most Western policymakers have been reticent to even consider such a solution. But that is largely because they wrongly assumed that regime change in Iran could only be accomplished through a declaration of war, and even then, chaos and instability would be the likeliest outcomes. But these assumptions have been upended – or should have been – by the 2022 uprising, which was widely recognized as the greatest challenge to the ruling system since the Iranian Revolution in 1979 that overthrew the despotic regime of the Shah.

It is not only that that uprising brought the clerical regime to the brink of overthrow, it is also that it was backed up by the network of “Resistance Units,” affiliated to the principal resistance movement, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK) with participation by Iranians from all walks of life, demonstrating strong national unity in support of a democratic cause. The power of that unity would be greatly magnified if it also included Western leaders demonstrating their readiness to support the Iranian people politically as they set about. implementing Mrs. Rajavi’s ten-point plan for a free, secular-pluralist, and non-nuclear republic Iran.

Many Western policymakers have long endorsed that plan and recognized the NCRI as a viable alternative to the mullahs’ dictatorship. A US-led strategy of Maximum Pressure Plus would finally bring standing on the side of the Iranians and the organized resistance into the mainstream and put Iran well on track to joining a global community of democratic nations.

Sir Alan Meale (Labour) was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Mansfield from 1987 to 2017. He is also an honorary Vice-president of the Council of Europe