May 9, 2018

• It isn’t that hard to devise a credible post-nuclear deal approach to the Iranian clerical regime. We can use America’s approach to the Soviet Union as a model: Contain, roll back, and squeeze.
• The Islamic Republic now resembles the Soviet Union of 1979: a police state, incapable of reforming itself while drowning in corruption and economic ineptitude, expands abroad to protect the nation and its “faith.”
• America is the stronger party, by far. Let us try to crack the regime. The contradictions that gnaw at the regime are as great as those that debilitated the Soviet Union.

  The writer, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, served as a Middle Eastern targets officer with the CIA.