Illustration – The world can hold the prison door open. Only the Iranian people can walk through it.
The United States cannot choose Iran’s future—but it can help create the conditions for Iranians to choose it themselves. The Iranians desire to live in a country where government serves its citizens instead of controlling them through fear.
By: The Editorial Board , Opinion
The U.S.-Iran Memorandum of Understanding, signed only weeks ago to reduce hostilities and restore secure shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, has effectively collapsed.
Rather than establishing a foundation for peace, the agreement exposed a fundamental reality: Washington and Tehran were never negotiating toward the same objective.
The memorandum relied on ambiguous language that each side interpreted differently. It left unresolved the central questions surrounding the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions relief and enforcement. Renewed attacks and counterattacks have now demonstrated how fragile that arrangement was. Instead of ending the conflict, the agreement merely postponed its next phase.
The deeper problem, however, was not simply the wording of a defective agreement. It was the nature of the Iranian regime itself.
For nearly five decades, Iran’s rulers have built their regional influence through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has armed, financed and supported proxy organizations throughout the Middle East. These groups have prolonged conflicts in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Syria and Yemen while allowing Tehran to project power far beyond its borders.
The death of Ali Khamenei has not fundamentally altered that system. If anything, the IRGC has become even more central to Iran’s political and military decision-making. Analysts have increasingly described Iran as evolving from a clerical dictatorship into a system in which the Revolutionary Guards exercise dominant power behind the country’s formal institutions.
As long as that structure remains intact, any agreement with Tehran is likely to prove temporary. The regime depends on confrontation abroad and repression at home to justify its authority.
Its treatment of the Iranian people is equally revealing.
Amnesty International recorded at least 2,159 executions in Iran during 2025, more than double the previous year’s figure and the highest total Amnesty had documented for the country in decades. Iran alone accounted for most of the sharp global increase in recorded executions.
The repression continued in 2026. Protesters and dissidents have faced expedited trials, torture-tainted confessions and politically motivated death sentences. Amnesty described January 2026 as the deadliest period of repression by Iranian authorities in decades of its research.
Yet despite imprisonment, executions, censorship and violence, the Iranian people have continued to demand change.
The words “Woman, Life, Freedom” survived long after the regime attempted to crush the movement that carried them. They represent something Iran’s rulers have never been able to eliminate: the desire of millions of Iranians to live in a country where government serves its citizens instead of controlling them through fear.
That desire offers the best hope not only for Iran, but also for the wider Middle East.
Successive American administrations have tried sanctions, negotiations, military pressure and diplomatic engagement. None has fundamentally changed the regime’s behavior. Tehran has continued to expand its missile capabilities, support armed proxies, threaten its neighbors and suppress its own population.
The collapse of the latest agreement should therefore end the illusion that another round of negotiations alone will produce lasting peace.
But helping the Iranian people achieve freedom does not mean invading Iran, occupying the country or allowing Washington to select its future leaders. Such a strategy would be both dangerous and self-defeating. It would allow the regime to portray every Iranian dissident as an agent of a foreign power and could replace dictatorship with chaos.
Iranian freedom must come from within.
The proper role of the United States is to help Iranians overcome the tools the regime uses to isolate, intimidate and control them.
First, Washington should help break the information blockade. Iranian authorities have repeatedly used nationwide internet shutdowns to prevent protesters from communicating and to conceal repression from the outside world. Research into the 2026 shutdowns found that more than 96 percent of Iran’s visible internet networks were effectively cut off. The United States should expand access to satellite communications, censorship-resistant technology and secure digital tools.
Second, sanctions should target the machinery of repression rather than indiscriminately punish the population. Revolutionary Guard commanders, Basij officials, prison administrators, judges responsible for political executions, censorship companies and the foreign financial networks of regime leaders should face coordinated sanctions, asset freezes and travel bans.
Third, the United States and its allies should expose the wealth accumulated overseas by senior Iranian officials and their families. Iranians deserve to see how leaders who demand sacrifice from the public have enriched themselves through corruption, monopolies and privileged access to state resources.
Fourth, Washington should support independent Iranian civil society. That means helping journalists, labor organizations, women’s networks, students, lawyers, human-rights investigators and families of political prisoners—not merely promoting a handful of prominent figures living abroad.
Fifth, the international community should preserve evidence of executions, torture and attacks on protesters so that those responsible understand that political change will not erase their crimes. Individual accountability is more effective and more just than collective punishment.
Finally, the United States and Europe should offer Iranians a credible vision of what could follow democratic change: phased sanctions relief, renewed international trade, access to frozen civilian assets, reconstruction assistance and normal relations with the world.
Washington should not decide whether Iran becomes a republic, a constitutional monarchy or adopts some other democratic system. That decision belongs exclusively to the Iranian people through free elections and a legitimate constitutional process.
The principles, however, should be clear: civilian government, equal citizenship, religious freedom, protection of minorities, rejection of political violence and respect for Iran’s territorial unity.
America cannot deliver freedom to Iran. But it can stop strengthening the forces that deny it. It can help Iranians communicate, organize and expose the regime’s crimes. It can hold the oppressors accountable while giving the population confidence that democratic change will bring opportunity rather than abandonment.
Peace in the Middle East will depend not only on ending individual wars, but also on dismantling the system that has fueled so many of them for nearly half a century.
The world can hold the prison door open.
Only the Iranian people can walk through it.
