How the U.S. Can Support Iran’s Anti-Regime Protests

As Iranian authorities brace for a second week of antigovernment protests, the Trump administration is weighing measures to lend support to the demonstrators.

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Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior Iran analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said the administration's messaging approving of the protesters has been “spot on.” He acknowledged the risk of the regime using American sentiments of support to undercut the demonstrations as a product of outside meddling, but said the regime will try to smear the protesters as foreign proxies regardless of the facts on the ground.

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“Rhetorically, the administration cannot hold its punches,” Taleblu told the Washington Free Beacon. “The hardest of hardliners—the Supreme Leader and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps—they castigate any grassroots, organic uprising as a result of foreign meddling … so the U.S. might as well do the strategic and morally right thing and that's to lend support to the cause of freedom in Iran.”

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Taleblu said the administration should calibrate its messaging by ensuring Iranians can access broadcasts by U.S.-government affiliated media like Voice of America and Radio Farda, a Farsi version of Radio Free Europe. He said by presenting the facts on the ground in an unbiased manner, these outlets can “poke a hole through the veneer” that Iran has been stable and prosperous over the past decade.

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“These outlets have the capability of saying, ‘No, look at the conditions on the ground. Look how the Iranian government treats its own people and look how the Iranian government prioritizes its own interests. It tries to fight and kill and spend copious amounts of money in Syria rather than investing that money at home,'” Taleblu said.

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Another way in which the United States can back the antigovernment demonstrators is by imposing non-nuclear sanctions should the Islamic Republic continue its violent crackdown on demonstrators. Phillips said the sanctions could include travel bans on authorities that commit human rights violations against the protesters. Taleblu said the Trump administration should target Ayatollah Khameini's business empire.

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“If the Iranian people are out in the street saying death to the dictator, it helps for the U.S. government to actually have sanctions on that dictator and to impede the repression of that dictator and to block the financial assets of that dictator and to be in the process of dismantling that dictator's financial empire,” Taleblu said.

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Finally, both Phillips and Taleblu said the administration must urge European allies to engage in diplomatic isolation. Given that European states such as the United Kingdom and Germany have a greater stake in upholding the nuclear agreement, Phillips said the United States should threaten to reapply nuclear sanctions, in effect blowing up the deal, if those countries fail to cutoff their business dealings with the regime.

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