By: Daniel McCarthy / New York Post
Translation: Telegrafi.com
Can Donald Trump's administration do in Iran what he achieved in Venezuela last month?
That was the intriguing question raised by Paul Pillar, senior fellow at the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University (previously with 28 years of experience at the CIA), during a meeting Thursday in Washington.
The reason for this was a Center for the National Interest panel on what lies ahead for Iran, where experts Sina Azodi, director of Middle East Studies at Georgetown University, and Alex Vatanka, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, offered their opinions.
Pillar has long been a critic of American foreign policy, and no one would mistake him for a MAGA supporter — but his question showed how President Trump has changed the debate in Washington.
A week ago, in the same room, I was surprised to hear a former State Department official, James Rubin, who had served in the administrations of Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, also acknowledge how Trump has reshaped the foreign policy game, in ways that even his opponents sometimes have to acknowledge as best they can.
Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest magazine, asked Rubin whether Trump's successful capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro has cured America of the modern equivalent of the "Vietnam syndrome" - a reluctance to use force stemming from the country's bitter experience with "endless wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Trump apparently eliminated Maduro with ease; can he do the same with Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei?
Vatanka had no doubt about one thing: the 86-year-old's reign of terror was coming to an end.
The hard question is how much blood will end up in it - and how violent will be what comes next.
Vatanka, born in Tehran and educated in Britain, stressed that "desertion from the regime" is essential.
According to him, even some of the lower-level leaders of the Islamic Republic understand that there is no future with Khamenei or other hardliners.
The ayatollah's anti-Americanism and hatred of Israel have failed - this regime has lived on slogans and reaped only misery for everyone, including insiders of the system.
They want to save themselves, Vatanka argues, and will betray the ayatollah and his inner circle if given the chance.
According to Vatankas, a regime beheading like the one Trump carried out in Venezuela will only work if America first creates the conditions for a split among the elites within the corridors of power in Iran, just as elements within Maduro's socialist tyranny turned against the tyrant himself.
What America must avoid, he warns, is giving less determined officials in Iran the feeling that they have no way out and that they must fight to the death.
Their hopes for survival are a powerful asset that can be used against Khamenei, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC], and the regime's most violent actors.
Vatanka sees a role for Reza Pahlavi, the son of the overthrown Shah, in removing the now senile Islamic "revolutionary" regime from power.
The vast majority of Iranians - 70 percent by Vatanka's estimate - grew up after 1979. They have no harsh memories of the brutalities of the monarchy; all the horrors they experienced were committed by the clerical regime, and if nothing else, Pahlavi is a symbol of an alternative - whatever that may be.
Every Iranian knows his name and knows that he represents something different - and that may be enough, at least as a transitional leader.
The other panelist disagreed: Azodi was once a supporter of Pahlavi, but now thinks the exiled Shah's heir is surrounded by untrustworthy people, more interested in revenge than an orderly transition, while Pahlavi himself wants "a positioning from above, not a revolution from below."
"He is not a unifying factor," says Azodi, and by threatening to hang anyone associated with the current regime, he only strengthens its cohesion.
Azodi warns that if the regime feels completely condemned, it will explode uncontrollably, hitting every state in the region with the ballistic missiles that are its only effective offensive capability.
The Gulf Cooperation Council [GCC] - Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that cooperate on regional security and economic development - fears this scenario above all, although Vatanka argues that the GCC may be motivated more by the prospect of economic cooperation with a stabilized Iran than by alarm about the chaos that would bring greater destabilization.
The progress of the entire region is being hindered by Khamenei's obsessive, but futile, hostility toward America and Israel.
So if the ayatollah leaves - urged on by realists within the regime itself - will the problem be solved?
The panelists noted that Shiite Islam does not necessarily need a supreme cleric, much less one with political power: the role held by Khamenei is much less traditional than outsiders realize, a religious and political innovation of his predecessor, the founding ideologue of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini.
Just as Khamenei's time is ending, so is the era of clerical dictatorship, the appeal for which has waned even among regime insiders.
Iran has lost 47 years to this fanatical but incompetent regime, and it's not just the outspoken opponents who know this.
However, the panelists saw little likelihood that the Artesh - the main body of the military - would intervene to overthrow political rulers, as long as the KGRI keeps the ayatollah in power.
If he were to be kidnapped like Maduro - or destroyed like the Fordow reactor - the regime, like a hydra, would grow a new head if the body was not first torn apart by defections.
A “Maduro option” is not a simple solution for Iran.
However, if Vatanka is right, more and more figures within the government itself think they are better off taking their chances with Trump than sticking with Khamenei.
The president has already changed the way Washington sees the world; he is gradually changing the way Tehran sees it as well. /Telegraph
