Trump Is Betraying Iran’s Pro-Democracy Protesters
In January, Donald Trump uttered the most idealistic words of his presidency. As protesters filled Iran’s streets, he told them, “Help is on the way.” How well they heard him through the regime’s internet blackouts is unclear, but his message was that their sacrifice might be worth it—that the world’s most powerful man was backing them.
Those protesters now have good reason to feel betrayed. Before the Islamic Republic began murdering their fellow pro-democracy demonstrators by the thousands, Trump barely lifted a finger to support them. This month, soon after he launched strikes in the name of ousting the regime that committed these atrocities, he told the protesters, “When we are finished, take over your government.” But he quickly retracted any such notion by suggesting that he would happily strike a deal with a faction of the existing regime. In other words, Iranian democracy was never really the point. Then, on Friday, he dismissed the protesters’ chances of overthrowing the regime. “I think that’s a big hurdle to climb,” he told Fox News.
[Anne Applebaum: Everyone but Trump understands what he’s done]
When Trump thought protesters might triumph, he made them extravagant promises. After it became clear that they weren’t going to quickly overthrow the mullahs, he treated them as disposable allies. His offhand commentary casts doubt on their prospects—potentially demoralizing the very people he once claimed to champion—and he has dismissed alternatives such as Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s deposed shah. By refusing to apologize for accidental strikes against civilians, he has bolstered the regime’s claim that the United States doesn’t really care what happens to the Iranian people.
The failure to nurture a democratic Iranian opposition is a bipartisan legacy of American foreign policy. Barack Obama kept his distance from the Green Revolution of 2009, when Iranians poured into the streets to protest a stolen election. Haunted by the CIA’s role in the 1953 coup that toppled Mohammad Mosaddegh, he avoided encouraging the protesters or promising them support. (To be fair, a faction of the opposition avowedly didn’t want American support, because the regime used the specter of it as a pretext for crushing dissent.) When he began negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, he seemed to believe that pressing the regime over human-rights abuses would only hinder diplomacy. He squandered an opportunity to bargain for guarantees that might have protected Iranian civil society or at least given activists a measure of hope.
Presidents would not have needed to search hard for a better way. In Communist Poland, the CIA quietly supplied the Solidarity movement with money and the tools of underground communication—fax machines, printing presses, computers—channeling them through the AFL-CIO and the Vatican. In Czechoslovakia, Radio Free Europe broadcast dissident manifestos back into the country after the regime suppressed them. None of this prevented Ronald Reagan from brokering major arms-control agreements with the Soviets. All of it patiently undermined the Warsaw Pact from within.
Where past administrations have been negligent in extending a hand to the foes of the Islamic Republic, the Trump administration has zealously dismantled the machinery that the United States once used to support democratic movements abroad. His administration gutted Voice of America, placing 1,300 employees on leave. It has spent the past year trying to strangle the National Endowment for Democracy, the government-funded foundation that bankrolls the sinews of civil society in authoritarian states—independent newspapers, labor unions, and human-rights monitors. It also proposed eliminating the undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy, and human rights and dismissed career officials who worked on that portfolio as “left-wing activists.” Courts have in some cases attempted to stay the administration’s hand—on Tuesday, for example, a judge rejected the administration’s attack on VOA and ordered staffers to return to work by next week—but the damage will not be easily undone.
This campaign to raze the federal bureaucracy has also undermined the cause of Iranian regime change. Kari Lake, who oversees the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which runs Voice of America, boasted about the efficiencies gained after reducing the agency’s Farsi-language broadcasting—from round-the-clock programming to sometimes as little as 30 minutes a day. According to news reports, she also refused to authorize the use of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty transmitters capable of broadcasting into Iran at the height of the January protests (a claim that Lake has contested). When the United States attacked Iran last June, she was forced to recall several dozen VOA Persian-service broadcasters whom she had placed on administrative leave. When the conflict simmered, many of those staffers were put back on leave. Given Trump’s hostility to civil society and the free press at home, he was never going to sincerely promote them abroad.
[Read: What is Kari Lake trying to achieve?]
Iran should have been the next chapter in the democratic revolutions that ended the Cold War. Over the decades, protesters keep returning to the streets, knowing they may end up hanging from a noose or lying in a mass grave. By defying their tormentors, they advance American interests and what we once called American values. Yet they have been treated as pawns for decades, and now Trump has toyed with their hopes, raising expectations he never intended to fulfill, urging them to risk their lives, then admitting, in so many words, that he never meant it. If regime change is the only lasting solution to the Iranian nuclear problem, then American foreign policy should begin and end with the people willing to risk their lives to change it.