Prosperity or annihilation: A tough choice for the Iranian regime

US President Donald Trump laid out the conditions for a peace agreement that he is ready to negotiate with the Iranian regime. At the same time, he is re-enforcing the US military presence in the Middle East to be ready for a ground operation.

If the Iranian regime accepts Trump’s conditions, Iran’s future as an economic power would be bright, but its ability to support terrorism and to intimidate its neighbors would be gone. On the other hand, if they insist on rejecting his conditions, all indications are that Trump intends to impose a military solution from which the Iranian regime cannot recover.

So, the choice for the Iranian regime is simple: prosperity or annihilation.

To most governments, this choice would be trivial, but the Iranian regime isn’t a normal government. Their goal isn’t the prosperity of their people. Their goal is quite different, although many people, especially in the West, refuse to see it.

We refuse to see it despite the fact that the Iranian regime stated their goal very clearly from the start. The original “supreme Leader”, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, “affirmed repeatedly that the foundation stone of his philosophy, the very purpose of his revolution, was to destroy Western-style democracy and its way of life, and to impose Shia Islam on the whole world”.

As explained in a study titled “The Fundamentals of Iran’s Islamic Revolution” and written by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, “The preamble to the [Iranian] constitution explicitly underlines Iran’s commitment to exporting the Islamic Revolution overseas” and “Western policymakers have severely underestimated the extent of Iran’s commitment to upholding and exporting 1979’s revolutionary ideology”.

This goal might seem laughable when we know that Israel and the US fully control Iranian skies and can bomb anywhere that they choose to within the Iranian territory. The regime’s military capabilities have been severely reduced. Israel has already eliminated the most senior members of the Iranian regime and those who replaced them are in permanent hiding.

The Iranian Islamic regime is facing the biggest crisis in its history. The rial, the Iranian currency, is at an all-time low and inflation is at an all-time high. The Iranian regime just introduced a 10,000,000 rial banknote. This new note is worth today about US$7.60, a little more than the price of a Starbucks Frappuccino.

And it may yet get much worse for the Iranian regime. How on earth do they think that they can impose their will on the world?

To a sane person, that of course makes no sense, but the fanaticism of the Iranian regime is not within the realm of sanity. It’s the same as for Hamas and Hezbollah. They keep losing. They keep getting decimated. Then they regroup again under the same single-minded goal that eclipses all else: the destruction of Israel. The fact that their goal appears totally ridiculous to sane Westerners makes no difference. It is their raison d’être, period.

It’s the same for the Iranian regime. The fact that their goal makes us laugh doesn’t prove anything other than our naivety. It is no laughing matter for them, and the fact that we don’t take them seriously only helps them believe that we are easy pickings.

Neutralizing such a fanatical group is not easy, which is why Western governments have tried to ignore the Iranian problem for a long time. It now appears, however, that Trump will not shy away from this challenge. At the same time, it does not appear that the Iranian regime will make the only sane choice.

Unless Trump backs down, which seems unlikely, the Iranian regime’s only hope seems to be that the regime’s survivors may be less fanatical than their predecessors and may be willing to put aside, for now, the goal of world domination. That too seems unlikely, but one never knows.