Everyone wants change, but Iran isn’t listening

Iran’s leaders faced two major challenges at the end of 2017. The first was in October, when US President Donald Trump refused to certify Iranian compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal, and threatened to withdraw completely unless it was renegotiated. The second challenge came with the widespread spontaneous protests that erupted in December, as Iranians throughout the country complained about their living conditions and demanded regime change. 
The challenges, like the protests, continued into January. Trump waived economic sanctions related to the deal, but said he would not do so again unless issues such as Iran’s regional meddling and its ballistic missile activities were addressed before the next deadline in May. 
The European Union supports the nuclear deal, and has been lobbying on its behalf in the US Congress. “We and our European partners are absolutely clear. We want the deal to succeed,” Britain’s Minister for the Middle East, Alistair Burt, told a Euromoney Iran conference in Paris last week. “We … are working with our European partners to mitigate concerns the United States may have to ensure it continues. Iran must avoid actions that threaten regional security.”
Nevertheless, the reality is that if the US walks out of the deal, European countries will have no choice but to limit their banking and business contacts with Iran, to avoid US sanctions.
At the same conference, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, who was Iran’s chief negotiator for the nuclear deal, insisted that there was no link between the agreement and Iran’s role in the Middle East.
 

Leaders in Tehran insist there is no link between the nuclear deal and Iran’s Middle East policies, but the Iranian people know there is — and they want the regional meddling to stop. 

Camelia Entekhabifard 

What Araghchi omitted to mention is that there is a link between that role and the Iranian public’s dissatisfaction with their economic plight. The fortune spent on supporting Bashar Al-Assad in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon comes from Iranian pockets. No one will forget the slogans chanted by protesters in January, demanding that the Iranian government stop wasting money on Assad, Hezbollah and Hamas. 
The everyday economic plight of Iranians has not improved since the nuclear accord was signed in 2015, despite the lifting of sanctions and the ability of investors to enter the market. One of the reasons the economy has not received a boost is that many of the big banks are reluctant to do business with Iran because of continuing uncertainty over the future of the nuclear deal. 
The regime in Tehran is caught between its own people’s demands for economic and social improvements on the one hand, and on the hand pressure from the US and Europe to end its meddling in the Middle East, its ballistic missile activities and its support for regional militias such as Hamas and Hezbollah. 
“Our missile capability is for defense,” Araghchi insists. It is true that Iran’s air defense system has not been significantly upgraded since the revolution in 1979, because of the sanctions imposed on the regime as a result of its aggressive behavior and support for terrorism. It is also true that Iranians are patriotic, and they agree that the nation needs a capable self-defense system. 
But what Iranians do not agree with is the behavior of the ruling clerical system that exists only to support its own ideology, regardless of the nation’s dissatisfaction. Wasting the people’s money by pouring it into a bottomless pit to finance regional meddling has shattered the confidence of the international community, as well as ordinary Iranians, in the country’s rulers.
It’s as simple as this: The West, and ordinary Iranians too, are asking the regime to change its behavior — and the regime is not listening.

• Camelia Entekhabifard is an Iranian-American journalist, political commentator and author of Camelia: Save Yourself By Telling the Truth (Seven Stories Press, 2008).