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OPINION:
For more than four decades, Western policy toward Iran has oscillated between pressure and negotiation. Sanctions are imposed, talks resume and policymakers attempt to contain the Islamic republic’s destabilizing behavior.
Underlying this approach is a persistent assumption: that a sufficiently weakened regime — economically constrained, diplomatically isolated and militarily limited — can be managed over time. Still, management is not stability.
A weakened ideological regime does not produce durable order. It produces prolonged uncertainty. Sanctions and maximum pressure are essential tools. They constrain resources, limit military expansion and reduce the regime’s ability to sustain proxy networks. They impose costs. They create leverage.
Leverage is meaningful only if it serves a strategic objective. The objective must be stability, and stability cannot emerge from permanent fragility.
History provides a clear lesson. During the Dhofar conflict in Oman in the 1970s, Marxist forces backed by Soviet and Chinese influence threatened to establish a strategic foothold on the Arabian Peninsula. Had that effort succeeded, the Persian Gulf and the global energy flows passing through the Strait of Hormuz would have faced sustained ideological destabilization.
The decisive factor in preventing that outcome was the presence of a strong and stable Iran under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Iran intervened to support Oman not as an act of expansion, but as a stabilizing force preventing ideological penetration into the Persian Gulf.
Iran’s strength, aligned with regional order, protected not only its own interests but also broader international stability. Weakness would not have achieved that outcome.
Today, Western policy often measures success by the degree to which the Islamic republic is weakened. Economic strain is interpreted as progress. Diplomatic isolation is viewed as containment. Yet weakening a regime does not change its ideological foundation. Iran remains structurally committed to strategic confrontation, asymmetric leverage and regional disruption. Containment limits capability; it does not create it.
The strategic question facing Washington is no longer whether to pressure or negotiate. It is whether U.S. policy aligns with the political transformation already unfolding inside Iran.
Political change in Iran cannot and should not be imposed from outside. It is a process driven by Iranian society itself. In recent years, millions of Iranians have openly rejected the ideological legitimacy of the current system despite extraordinary personal risk. Independent reporting and widely documented protest movements show demonstrators invoking Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi as an opposition leader and expressing support for a political future rooted in national sovereignty, secular governance and international reintegration.
These developments reflect not isolated unrest, but the emergence of a coherent national opposition movement.
The demand of the Iranian people is that Western governments refrain from legitimizing or prolonging a tyrannical ideological theocracy through negotiations that assume its indefinite permanence. Negotiations that preserve the regime without addressing its structural instability do not resolve the problem. They defer it.
Maximum pressure, properly understood, does not impose political change. It prevents the consolidation of a system that lacks durable national legitimacy. It creates the conditions in which political transformation, driven by the Iranian people themselves, can unfold.
The United States does not need to engineer regime change in Iran, but it must ensure that its policies do not inadvertently sustain a system fundamentally misaligned with long-term regional stability. A stable Middle East requires a stable Iran.
Such stability cannot emerge from a permanently weakened ideological theocracy. It requires the emergence of a government whose legitimacy derives from its people and whose strategic incentives align with regional order rather than ideological confrontation.
Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi remains the only nationally recognized opposition leader with historical continuity, national visibility and a stated commitment to both secular democracy and a national referendum on Iran’s future political system. His leadership provides continuity and clarity during a period of inevitable political transition.
Recognizing credible opposition leadership does not impose change. It acknowledges political reality and aligns policy with the direction of Iran’s internal political trajectory.
Washington’s strategic choice is not between diplomacy and pressure; it is between indefinitely managing instability or aligning with the emergence of stability.
• Sepideh Bahrami is a water resources engineer and researcher living in California.
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