Iran International
The Islamic Republic will keep pursuing a nuclear weapon as long as it remains in power, and Washington should keep up military, economic and covert pressure even while it talks to Tehran, Roger Zakheim, director of the Ronald Reagan Institute, told Iran International.
Speaking on Veterans Day, Zakheim said President Donald Trump had set “the first principle” right by vowing to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, a promise he said Trump had made more than 90 times.
“My own view is that as long as this regime is in place, it will pursue a nuclear weapon,” he said. “So if he’s going to prevent the nuclear program, the regime will have to change as well.”
The interview came as Qatar stepped up its mediation. Its foreign ministry said on Tuesday that talks had made progress and that both sides had spoken positively about a diplomatic solution, a day after Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, met Trump at the White House. Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, called reports of negotiations or a meeting in Qatar “a pure lie.”
Zakheim, author of a new book on Reagan’s doctrine of peace through strength, said he had no objection to diplomacy, pointing to Reagan’s talks with Mikhail Gorbachev, as long as the pressure continues.
“I’m fine with talks to probe, to explore, to push, as long as we’re squeezing them at the same time: the blockade, the covert operation, the military presence, the ability to carry out a military operation at any moment,” he said. “If it’s diplomacy and everything else stops, I’d be very concerned.”
The US naval blockade of Iranian ports, first imposed in April, remains in place alongside a Treasury sanctions campaign the administration calls Economic Fury. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in Paris on Tuesday that the economic campaign was “so devastating that right now there is no need for major combat operations.”
Zakheim called the memorandum of understanding reached in June “a very flawed agreement.” Any new deal would need verification involving the United States, “not some third party we can’t trust or don’t know,” he said, and should be “ripped up” if Iran failed to comply.
The June 17 memorandum declared an end to military operations and set a 60-day window for a final deal on Iran’s nuclear program and sanctions. It soon unraveled over control of the Strait of Hormuz, and the deadline passed in August without an agreement.
“They’re just talking about talking,” Zakheim said.
Zakheim gave Trump high marks for Operation Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 US strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, and for Operation Epic Fury, the US-Israeli campaign launched on February 28 that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
“The decapitation, the attacks on the nuclear sites, taking out both the ballistic and cruise missile sites, has made this regime weaker,” he said.
But voters had soured on the war, he said, because the president “didn’t win decisively and got stuck in 140 days of diplomacy with a regime that will never compromise.”
He said he hoped a “very consequential covert program” was under way, with Washington backing those who want to replace the Islamic Republic. “We’ve never had an opportunity like the one we have right now to support the people in Iran who are freedom-loving,” he said, adding that Iran’s borders were “more porous than ever” and its skies open.
“It’s an unnatural regime that oppresses its people,” he said.
Iran executed at least 691 people in the first ten months of 2026, including 36 protesters, according to Norway-based Iran Human Rights, which recorded at least 77 executions in October alone.
No one was calling for US troops on the ground, Zakheim said, but Washington must be ready to strike again if Tehran rebuilds its nuclear or ballistic missile programs.
“After Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury, I felt it was the beginning of the end of this regime, and I still stand by that,” he said.
Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in the November 3 midterm elections, with anger over the war’s part in pushing up the cost of living helping drive the result, according to Reuters. They also plan to cut Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense budget request, Military.com reported. Zakheim said the president was right to seek it.
The Constitution gives the president, as commander in chief, authority over military and foreign affairs that Congress does not share, Zakheim said, and presidents often turn to foreign policy after midterm losses “because it’s the one thing they can control.” Congress holds the power to declare war and to fund the military.
He warned against a “new generation of détente advocates” and what he called “full-on declinists,” some of whom won seats in the midterms.
“They believe that if only America would retreat from the world and leave, the Iranians would be just fine,” he said. “There’s no evidence of that in the history since 1979.”
He traced Washington’s experience with the Islamic Republic to the 444-day hostage crisis, which ended as Reagan was sworn in in January 1981, and the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, which he described as America’s first encounter with Hezbollah.
“You don’t have to look far back to find the number of times this regime has murdered Americans,” he said
The US-based Committee to Protect Journalists warned on Friday that exiled Iranian journalists remain at risk after two men were convicted in London of spying for Tehran on staff of Iran International, which said the verdicts had not made its journalists safer.
The service, the Établissement français du sang (EFS), said in a written reply that a judicial investigation was under way and that it could not comment on it or give details.
The attack took place on the night of November 1 to 2. Hackers took over the control systems of cold rooms at three regional centers and changed their temperature and defrost settings, the EFS said earlier.
Some units were reset from about minus 30 degrees Celsius to 110 degrees, the French weekly Le Canard enchaîné reported. That was the setting, not the temperature the blood products reached.
Alarms and an on-call technician caught the problem, and the products were moved to other sites or otherwise secured, the EFS said. No samples or blood products were lost. The service has not said when the attack was detected, how long the transfer took, or how the stocks were moved.
The attack came the same night that supermarkets in at least nine European countries, including Belgium and Luxembourg, reported suspected cyberattacks that sent fridge and freezer temperatures soaring.
The Paris prosecutor’s office has not yet linked the attack on the blood service to the supermarket cases and said its investigation is continuing, Agence France-Presse reported.
On October 11 and 12, hackers took control of refrigeration systems at about 700 supermarkets and other businesses across France, letting fridges and freezers warm up. Some stores had to throw out their entire stock of fresh and frozen food, and officials said the attacks caused heavy losses and, at some sites, fires.
A joint report by French intelligence and cybersecurity agencies named Shahid Kaveh, an offensive cyber unit of the Revolutionary Guards, as responsible, and said it worked behind front groups posing as independent hacker collectives. Paris prosecutors have requested international arrest warrants for suspects.
Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot summoned Iran’s ambassador and said France would seek European Union sanctions against those responsible. France was weighing further measures, he said, including some it might never make public.
Armenia’s parliamentary approval of the Trump Route, a US-run transit corridor running along Iran’s northern border, has set off alarm in Tehran, with officials and state media warning that it would bring a US presence to the frontier.
Armenia’s parliament approved the agreement on October 28. Since then, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader has threatened Yerevan, and state-run media have urged Tehran to stop the project.
The Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) is designed to link Azerbaijan to its exclave of Nakhchivan through Armenia’s southern Syunik province. Syunik borders Iran’s East Azarbaijan province and carries Iran’s only direct land connection to Armenia, and through it to the rest of the Caucasus.
The route was announced at the White House in August 2025, when President Donald Trump hosted Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to sign a framework for peace between the two countries after decades of conflict.
Azerbaijan had long called the route the Zangezur corridor, and Tehran had opposed it for years, warning that it could cut Iran off from Armenia.
Under the agreement, Washington and Yerevan will set up a joint company, TRIPP Development, with the US side holding 74 percent and Armenia 26 percent. The initial term is 49 years, with an option to extend it by 50 years, during which Armenia’s stake would rise to 49 percent.
Iranian officials and analysts say TRIPP could cut Iran’s transit revenue and weaken its position as a regional transport hub. They also see a US presence near Iran’s northern border as a serious security threat.
The state-run Mehr News Agency, in a November 9 article titled “The Caucasus on the Path to US Influence: Tehran Must Prevent Implementation of the TRIPP Corridor,” said Iran should rethink its approach to the Caucasus in light of what it called the country’s “new position in regional equations” after the war with the United States and Israel.
“A different approach centered on power,” Mehr said, could stop activities that threaten Iran’s national security from spreading in the South Caucasus.
Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader on international affairs and a former foreign minister, attacked Pashinyan over the agreement in an article in the Ettela’at newspaper on November 5.
Velayati said he had told Armenia’s deputy foreign minister and its ambassador in Tehran that Russia’s preoccupation with the war in Ukraine should not lead Armenia into a “miscalculation.” Iran, he said, considered itself responsible for security in the South Caucasus, “with or without Russia.”
Iranian military commanders later traveled to the region and held a large exercise to show Iran’s “power and determination,” Velayati said. He said he had warned Armenia’s ambassador directly: “If Trump and his allies seek to cross this red line of Iran, we will break their legs.”
Armenia’s Security Council secretary, Armen Grigoryan, said in response that the project did not involve the presence of a single armed soldier, and that none of Armenia’s neighbors, Iran included, should see an economic project as a threat.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, said on Monday that Tehran had raised its concerns with Armenia immediately after Armenia, Azerbaijan and the United States issued their joint statement on the project.
Armenia had assured Iran that the route would not change international borders or the region’s geopolitical arrangements, and that no US military forces would be stationed there, he said.
Hardline media have kept up their attacks despite Armenia’s assurances.
On November 9, Jam-e Jam, a newspaper published by the state broadcaster, ran an article titled “Yerevan’s Gamble with Trump’s Card.”
“From the perspective of Iran’s national security doctrine, the emergence of an economic and administrative structure under US control in Syunik province, even if initially presented under the guise of transit and trade, is unacceptable,” the paper wrote.
Security threats do not have to begin with military bases, Jam-e Jam said. Strategic infrastructure and networks tied to hostile powers can lay the ground for long-term influence.
Mehdi Seif-Tabrizi, an analyst of Russian affairs, made a similar case in the Farhikhtegan newspaper on November 7.
“Tehran’s concern is fundamentally not limited to the possible deployment of US military forces. The issue is the formation of permanent infrastructure for influence in the vicinity of Iran’s borders, which could serve purposes beyond its initial economic objectives in times of crisis,” he wrote.
Iran’s concerns had grown more serious since its war with the United States, he added.
US forces shot down two drones Iran’s Revolutionary Guards launched toward Bahrain on Friday and nothing was damaged, the US military said, rejecting the Guards’ claim that they had destroyed a US early-warning radar on the island.
“The IRGC launched two one-way attack drones toward Bahrain and both were shot down by US forces. There were no injuries or damage,” US Central Command said on X.
Hours earlier, the Guards had said their aerospace force “targeted and destroyed the American aggressors’ early-warning radar on the island of Bahrain,” in a statement carried by the Guards-affiliated Fars news agency. Bahrain hosts the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
The Guards said the attack was retaliation for what they called “the enemy’s aerial aggression against a telecommunications tower in Sirik,” a coastal town in Hormozgan province, on the Gulf of Oman east of the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian state media said Sirik had been struck on Thursday but did not say by whom.
The statement called the attack “a serious warning” to stop what the Guards described as aerial provocations and oil smuggling in the Strait of Hormuz.
“If violations and acts of aggression are repeated, the IRGC Aerospace Force is on full alert for an unrestricted response,” it said. The Guards also threatened harsher measures against companies they accused of being “misled by the United States.”
The Guards’ commander, Ahmad Vahidi, warned on Friday that any attack on Iran would be answered with force.
“The smallest aggression will be answered with horrifying and painful blows,” he said at a funeral in Tehran for 110 unidentified soldiers killed in the 1980s war with Iraq, according to Tasnim. “The enemy should learn from the repeated defeats it has suffered; otherwise, greater lessons lie ahead.”
Vahidi also said revenge for the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “will be achieved.” He gave no details of when or how.
Mohammadreza Naghdi, a senior Guards adviser and former commander of the Basij militia, said revenge for Khamenei’s killing remained a public demand and that the matter would not be closed without it.
“The public demand for revenge is not new,” he said, adding that crowds at pro-government rallies had chanted for revenge every night for the past 257 nights.
The exchange comes as US President Donald Trump holds off on new strikes after appeals from regional states, while keeping the naval blockade of Iranian ports in place.
Iran’s top security official, Mohsen Rezaei, said this week that Iran would strike US bases as far as Europe if attacked again.
The UN nuclear watchdog does not know exactly where Iran’s newest uranium enrichment plant is or whether it holds nuclear material, more than a year after Tehran declared it, according to a report seen by Reuters on Friday.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran had not let inspectors examine the design of the underground Isfahan Fuel Enrichment Plant, or visit it, since declaring it in June 2025. The finding is in a quarterly report circulated to member states on Friday.
Iran notified the IAEA in June 2025 that it would build the plant at the site of the Nuclear Reactors Fuel Company in Isfahan, in central Iran. The notice named the site but not where the plant sits within it.
Tehran made the announcement right after the IAEA’s Board of Governors found Iran in breach of its safeguards obligations for the first time in almost 20 years. Mohammad Eslami, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said at the time that the plant had already been built and was being fitted with centrifuges.
“The site has been built and is secure,” he told state television, adding that enrichment would start once the equipment was installed.
Iranian state media called it the country’s third enrichment complex. The IAEA counts it as the fourth, after two plants at Natanz and one at Fordow.
Inspectors were due to make their first visit that month. It was canceled when Israel began striking Iran’s nuclear sites the same day.
Apart from the Bushehr nuclear power plant, Iran has given the IAEA no information on the state of its nuclear facilities and material and no access to them, the report said. In July 2025 Iran’s parliament passed a law suspending cooperation with the agency.
The IAEA called the gap in its knowledge of Iran’s enriched uranium a matter of “serious proliferation concern” that must be addressed with the “utmost urgency.” It said it could not conclude that no nuclear material had been diverted from peaceful use.
Director General Rafael Grossi said it was critical for inspectors to resume work in Iran “without further delay.”
Before the June 2025 strikes, the IAEA estimated that Iran held 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, a short step from the roughly 90 percent used in weapons. By the agency’s own yardstick, that is enough, if enriched further, for about 10 nuclear weapons. Inspectors have not been able to check how much remains or where it is.
Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said this week that “not even a particle” of Iran’s enriched uranium would leave the country, and that Tehran had told Russia the same.
Americans have repeatedly underestimated foreign efforts to influence their politics and public opinion, leaving the US vulnerable to campaigns by China, Russia and Iran, says Sean Durns, director of the Counter Extremism Research Center at the Capital Research Center.
Speaking at Iran International's Washington studio, Durns argued that influence operations and unconventional warfare are deeply embedded in the strategies of America's adversaries but remain poorly understood by much of the US public and political establishment.
"The American people are great people. They can be a bit naive," he said. Influence operations and hybrid warfare, he added, "have been ingrained into the DNA of the Chinese Communist Party since its founding, but they're very foreign to Americans."
Durns, a former deputy commentary editor at the Washington Examiner, leads a program launched last month by the conservative Capital Research Center to investigate extremist movements and foreign influence in the United States.
"These countries have a common enemy, and that is us," he said. "They do cooperate. They do collaborate, and we've seen that with the recent war, in fact, against Iran, where both China and Russia have given aid to Iran in its war against America."
A Ukrainian intelligence assessment reviewed by Reuters in April found that Russian satellites had carried out dozens of imagery surveys of military and critical sites across the Middle East to help Iran strike US forces and other targets.
In May, the Trump administration sanctioned several China-based firms it said had supplied satellite imagery that enabled Iranian strikes on US forces.
"The Chinese Communist Party views Iran as a foil, a way to tie down the United States,” Durns said, “so that it can continue to amass its power and challenge America for hegemony," he said.
Money and influence
Durns pointed to the network of Neville Roy Singham, an American-born former technology executive living in Shanghai, as an example of what he described as foreign influence reaching Western political movements.
Singham, who is married to Jodie Evans, a co-founder of the antiwar group Code Pink, has funded organisations that have attracted scrutiny over their promotion of Chinese government narratives.
In July, the House Ways and Means Committee subpoenaed three Singham-funded nonprofits—BreakThrough News, The People's Forum and Tricontinental—over approximately $40 million in funding linked to him.
Two of the organisations said the subpoenas violated the First Amendment. No charges have been filed.
Durns suggested that some demonstrations in Europe reflected organised influence campaigns rather than entirely spontaneous public mobilisation.
"It's important to understand, when the American public looks across the Atlantic and sees streets burning in Milan, Italy, or in Paris, France, or elsewhere, in Albania, in Spain, that these are not necessarily organic protests," he said.
Durns also accused such groups of exploiting the Gaza conflict to mobilise public anger.
"Gaza has been a very effective one for them, in which, of course, they use lies," he said. "They count on the public not being aware, not being educated."
He argued that social media platforms have made it easier for foreign influence campaigns to reach American audiences.
"There's no fact-checking on TikTok, and the algorithms are distorted to work on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party," he said.
Lessons from the Cold War
Durns said American complacency about foreign influence was not new, pointing to revelations about Soviet intelligence operations that emerged after the Cold War.
Among the examples he cited was the Mitrokhin Archive, a collection of notes compiled by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and smuggled to Britain in 1992, which exposed Soviet intelligence operations across the West.
"I have met a number of individuals in the press, or who are policymakers themselves, who have never heard of things like the Mitrokhin Archive," Durns said.
He suggested that a similar failure to understand the motivations of adversaries had shaped Washington's approach to the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution.
Successive American administrations, he argued, had repeatedly searched for moderate figures within Iran's leadership, misreading the nature of its political system.
"There are no moderates in the Iranian regime. The moderates have been expelled," he said. "They're in Evin prison, or they're elsewhere."
An enduring challenge
Durns rejected comparisons between the recent US war with Iran and the American experience in Vietnam, arguing that claims of an American defeat were misleading.
"There's been a very popular narrative, which is that America lost the current war against Iran, or that this war against Iran was like Vietnam," he said. "That is profoundly, profoundly false."
He also argued that Iran's economic weakness left Washington with substantial leverage despite Tehran's efforts to prolong the confrontation.
Durns compared the current mood in the United States to the 1970s, when America emerged from Vietnam amid widespread predictions of decline, only to prevail in the Cold War less than two decades later.
"So never count America out," he said. "But at the same time, the hour is getting late, and there are growing threats that have been massing over the course of many years that we need to confront and combat."
