ISLAMIC REVOLUTIONARY
GUARD CORPS
There is no hope for political reform led by Iranian moderates
However, the current US maximum pressure strategy will not result in political change either.
Trump administration's recent decision to impose sanctions on Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif ignited a discussion in western media and political spheres about the nature of the Islamic Republic.
The Democrats and leftists in the US, as well as their allies in Europe, appear to believe that there is an intensifying power struggle between moderates and hardliners in Iran. Based on this belief, they argue that the best policy to seek normalisation in relations with the Islamic Republic is to support the moderates over the hardliners, so that Iran can reform itself from within in the long term.
This is why they objected to President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw the US from the 2015 nuclear deal and impose new sanctions on Iran. In their view, this move was a colossal mistake that undermined the moderates and empowered the hardliners. Almost all Democratic presidential candidates in the US, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, have promised to go back to the nuclear deal, if they are elected president.
In contrast, conservative circles in the US and elsewhere believe that there is no real difference between the hardliners and reformists in Iran. They argue that both groups share the same ideology and only concern themselves with the regime's survival, not the liberation of the Iranian people or reformation of the Islamic Republic.
Moderates, they assert, are simply regime apologists who try to legitimatise its brutal policies. As Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the influential conservative think-tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, recently articulated, any contestation between hardliners and moderates in Iran, "is bureaucratic jealousy, not ideological competition". Based on this view, they want the US and its allies to follow policies that target the entire regime not just the hardline elements within it.