Is the Trump administration willing to support revolution in Iran?

Whenever I see that Michael Ledeen has written something about Iran I click to read it because he is the foremost expert on the subject. I wish Trump would hire him to develop policy on Iran. Anyway, here he writes at PJ Media. Ledeen writes that the central issue

is how to best promote the downfall of the Islamic Republic.

...If revolution were the consequence of misery, we’d see massive uprisings in North Korea and much of sub-Saharan Africa, as in Cuba. We’d expect Venezuela to join the heap of failed states most any day. But these revolutionary events are not taking place. Turmoil and misery abound, but the regimes hold fast.

Look at Iran today and you will see the streets full of protesters who want the end of the forty-year-old theocracy. Teachers, truck drivers, and bazaaris are all striking. Students, especially at universities, are leaving their classes to demonstrate against the regime. Even the Iranian Arabs in the oil-rich area near Basra are walking off the job, threatening natural gas and oil production. They are deliberately impoverishing themselves in order to promote revolution. It’s not a demand for higher income; it is mostly a revolt against a failed regime and in favor of greater freedom.

If you want to bring down the Islamic Republic, which should be the goal of a sensible Iran policy, you should actively support the strikers and demonstrators, rather than increase the misery of the people. How should you do that? First of all, by remembering how we did it to the Soviet Union. The dissidents needed better information about what was going on all over the empire. They needed to communicate with one another, and we enabled that by direct broadcasting via Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, and Radio Liberty. Moreover, we provided them with fax machines, the technological breakthrough that created an active network throughout the Soviet bloc.

Today, we should actively strengthen our Farsi-language radio and television broadcasting, and provide the millions of Iranian dissidents with technology to thwart internet censorship and expose the myriad failures of the mullahcracy.

We have nothing approaching such a strategy, nor are we even in ongoing collaboration with the dissidents. This must be reckoned a significant failure.

If we could effectively support the relatively small number of anti-Soviet revolutionaries, we can surely do the same for the enormous number of anti-mullah Iranians.

Economic warfare and fierce speeches alone will not bring down the Islamic Republic. Our greatest weapon is political, as the Soviet example proved. But our strategists, administration after administration, are unwilling to support revolution in Tehran, and there is no sign a change is in the works. It will not “just happen” when some imagined economic/social tipping point is passed.

Obama wanted a strategic alliance with Iran, which he infamously accomplished. Trump and Pompeo don’t want that. But they have still not embraced a strategy to defeat Khamenei and his henchmen. They say they want a change in regime behavior, but they cannot have that without regime change. They can accomplish that, but only if they fight for it.

Read more here.