The historic re-election of Donald Trump as America’s 47th president will have sent shivers down the spine of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader. News that the FBI have arrested 3 people charged with plotting to assassinate Donald Trump under direct instructions from the Iranian regime’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), will have further enraged the president-elect. During his previous term in office Trump cracked down hard on the theocratic regime. He unilaterally withdrew America from President Obama’s deeply flawed nuclear deal with the Iranians. He ramped up sanctions with his ‘Maximum Pressure’ campaign, and he ordered the elimination of Iran’s warmongering mastermind, Major General Qassem Soleimani, one of the most powerful terrorist figures in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Trump made it clear that he would not follow the UN and EU appeasement policy when it came to dealing with Iran.
Soleimani was commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) Quds Force – responsible for their extra-territorial operations, creating proxy wars and havoc throughout the Middle East. The IRGC was listed as a foreign terrorist organization by President Trump in 2019 and by the Canadian government in June 2024, but still the UN and EU treat it as a bona fide organization. That will not sit well with President Trump. As an outright supporter of Israel, he will not tolerate the Iranian regime’s aggressive behaviour and the IRGC’s backing for Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, the Shi’ia militias in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Nor will he have any truck with the regime’s hostage-taking, their sponsorship of international terrorism and their perversion of diplomacy.
Trump has vowed to end the Israel-Hamas and Israel-Hezbollah war as a priority, and Benjamin Netanyahu – the Israeli prime minister, can expect some robust conference calls in the next few days. But so too can António Guterres, the UN Secretary General and Ursula von der Leyen – President of the European Commission. Guterres has presided over the worst aspects of UN appeasement policy. After the Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash on 19 May 2024, the UN Security Council (UNSC) in New York shamefully offered their condolences and held a one-minute silence. Raisi was known as the ‘Butcher of Tehran’ for his role as an executioner of tens of thousands of political prisoners. Nevertheless, the UN HQ in Geneva disgracefully flew their flag at half-mast in his honour and in an outrageous affront to the Butcher’s victims, the UN General Assembly held a memorial service on 30th May.
Even though the European Parliament in 2024adopted a unanimous resolution urging the EU to designate the IRGC as a terrorist organisation, the European Commission and the 27 Member States have refused to do so and continued their appeasement policy towards Iran. By prioritizing economic interests and the defunct nuclear deal over human rights concerns, the EU has signalled to Iran's rulers that they can abuse their own people with impunity, while spreading war and terror abroad. This failure to stand up for democratic values and universal rights has made the EU complicit in the suffering of the Iranian peopleunder their theocratic tyranny. Western governments’ strategies in response to the Iranian regime’s aggression have served only to embolden the ruling clerics, who have faced no repercussions for their myriad crimes and violations of international law, particularly concerning their nuclear ambitions.
But on 28th October the mullahs’ crossed a red line that even the EU will find hard to ignore. Jamshid Sharmahd, 69, a German/Iranian dissident, was hanged in Evin Prison, Tehran. For some years Sharmahd had operated a small radio station in the U.S. critical of the Iranian regime. During a flight to India stopover in Dubai in 2020, Iranian agents kidnapped him and smuggled him back to Iran via Oman, where he spent more than three years in solitary confinement in the country’s medieval dungeons. Afflicted by Parkinson’s disease,Sharmahd was denied medical care, lost more than 80 pounds during his detention and nearly all of his teeth. The German Foreign Minister had repeatedly warned Tehran that there would be “serious consequences” if they executed Sharmahd, but typically those serious consequences turned out to be nothing more than the “summoning of the Iranian chargé d'affaires” in Berlin. Chancellor Olaf Scholz then ordered the closure of three Iranian consulates in Germany. While that might make life harder for some Iranian nationals living in Germany, it will do absolutely nothing to pressure the regime. A slap on the wrist for the illegal execution on trumped up charges of a European citizen, is surely scraping the barrel of appeasement.
Terrified that Iran’s increasingly rebellious population will rise up and overthrow the fascist clerical regime, the mullahs have resorted to a frenzy of executions aimed at terrorizing the people into submission. There were 170 recorded hangings in October alone, an 85% increase on the same time last year. The main targets for arrest, torture and execution are political opponents of the regime, generally charged with spurious offences such as “waging war against God” or "corruption on Earth", the bogus accusation that led Jamshid Sharmahd to the gallows.
The strategy for regime change in Iran can be enabled by international isolation of the regime. One of the most effective measures would be the blacklisting of the IRGC by the EU and the UK and the complete severance of diplomatic relations. This would involve closing all EU and UK embassies in Iran and, reciprocally, shutting down Iranian embassies across EU member states and in the UK. Expelling all of the regime's diplomats from European soil would send an unequivocal message of condemnation, stripping the dictatorship of its diplomatic channels used to justify its behaviour and further weakening its grip on power. Such a move would not only underscore the international community's refusal to legitimize the regime but would also amplify the voices of the Iranian people as well as internal pressures on the Iranian regime, hastening its inevitable collapse. These are the measures that the incoming Trump presidency would heartly endorse.