A 'tear down the wall' moment in Iran will damage both the Islamic Republic — and China
Having already demonstrated a willingness to use American military might in the B-2 strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities last year that brought the Twelve-Day War to an end, President Donald Trump is robustly supporting the brave Iranian people now entering their third week of protests against the theocratic regime that has oppressed them for so long.
President Trump’s response to the Iranian protests couldn’t be more different from President Obama’s to the 2009 Green Revolution. Just days after Obama gave a speech in Cairo called "A New Beginning" in which he offered an outstretched hand to the mullahs in the hopes of diplomatic engagement, Iranian people inconveniently flooded into the streets to protest an obviously fraudulent election. It took the regime days to muster an effective response.
Even after unarmed protestors were shot in the streets, Obama opted for strategic silence, despite the fact that the Islamic Republic had been an implacable foe of America for some 30 years at that point. As his future Secretary of State, John Kerry, gushed in The New York Times, Obama’s reticence would prevent the mullahs from blaming the protests on America, while leaving the door open for the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that Kerry would negotiate.
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Obama’s silence turned out to be great for the Iranian regime, which would spend the coming years bilking his administration into that disastrous nuclear deal that meant hundreds of billions of dollars for Tehran, but disaster for the Iranian people. Forgotten while the regime attacked them with impunity, the protests dwindled to nothing.
Eighteen years later, President Trump seems determined not to repeat this unfortunate failure. While he, too, offered Tehran the opportunity for diplomacy on their nuclear program, when they refused to negotiate in good faith, he ordered the B-2 bombing strike. After the combined might of Israel and the U.S. in the Twelve-Day War revealed the regime to be paper tigers, the Iranian people have started to come back to life.
As Tehran has failed to provide basic services such as food, water and fuel — not to mention a stable currency or a functioning economy — they were emboldened to take to the streets and stay there with numbers and tenacity that dwarf 2009.
Also, and importantly, the Iranian people know that China, the regime’s main patron, did nothing to assist them during the war—and aren’t bailing them out now.
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In March 2021, at the beginning of President Joe Biden’s term, China and Iran signed a strategic partnership ushering in 25 years of economic and security cooperation. Since then, the PRC has preyed on Iran, pumping it for natural resources and military support for their other vassal, Russia. Theoretically at least, they have bolstered the regime’s defenses in return.
But when Israel and America attacked, those defenses were worthless and China took no action — something the Trump administration noted as well, suggesting there’s an opportunity to reduce Beijing’s influence in the Middle East and its access to inexpensive Iranian energy imports.
A more sinister Chinese export to Iran is the so-called National Information Network (NIN), derisively nicknamed by Iranians the "halal internet." Bolstered after the 2019 protests, this PRC-designed tool of information control is the mechanism through which the regime has been able to shut down the internet across Iran for almost a week. Given the cost to their already-teetering economy, they cannot go on this way indefinitely, but for the time being it has been an effective way to stifle communication in and out of Iran.
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If emergency communications systems can be preserved or replaced with a satellite-based system, targeted kinetic and cyberattacks on NIN infrastructure could be an effective way to materially support the protestors, as well as strike a blow against the Chinese-designed apparatus that has been used to oppress them.
President Trump’s robust statements about the protests, and warning of reprisals for attacks against them, are being criticized as giving the regime the opportunity to blame America for the uprising while creating a rally-around-the-flag effect that will bolster support for the mullahs. But just as some of Ronald Reagan’s own staff worried that the phrase "tear down this wall" was too provocative, these critics are simply too timid or craven to take the appropriate actions to follow up on the rhetoric.
The reality is that the Islamic Republic has blamed America for all their problems since 1979, regardless of what we did or didn’t do. President Trump has stopped giving the mullahs a veto over our actions, and, thanks to him, the Iranian people may soon be in the position to tear down the walls that have encircled them for so long.