For decades, Western governments feared the consequences of confronting Iran, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism. Today, they should be equally concerned about the consequences of failing to capitalize on the significant damage inflicted on the Islamic Republic.
Honest Reporting Canada has spent years documenting how Iran’s malign influence is too often ignored, not only through its terrorist proxies and human rights abuses, but through their insidious efforts at spreading propaganda in the West.
Our work monitoring Canadian media has given us a front-row view of how easily the Islamic Republic’s activities can disappear from Western public discourse, even as their consequences reach directly into our own communities.
The United States and Israel have severely degraded Iran’s military capabilities in recent months. Its nuclear infrastructure has been decimated , its ballistic missile arsenal degraded , its strategic air defence systems destroyed and 52 senior regime figures have been eliminated . Hezbollah and other members of Tehran’s terrorist network, including Hamas and the Houthis, have been weakened .
More important, the premise underlying Iran’s strategy for three decades has been shattered. Tehran believed it could attack Israel through proxies and would therefore be immune from attack while simultaneously advancing its atomic program as a nuclear threshold state and threatening Western interests, all while serving to insulate Iran from the consequences of its nefarious actions.
That calculation no longer holds.
But military setbacks do not necessarily translate into lasting strategic defeat. Iran’s immediate objective is no longer victory, but outlasting the United States.
If the regime can withstand the current pressure and eventually persuade Western governments to exchange sanctions relief for another diplomatic agreement, it may acquire the two things it needs most: money and time, both of which serve as patient pathways to acquiring atomic weapons and mitigating the regime’s existential concerns.
That would be a serious mistake.
Iran built its power painstakingly over decades: nuclear facilities, ballistic missiles and drones, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen. Together, they gave Tehran strategic depth and geographic spread.
Much of that architecture has now been damaged, degraded or destroyed. The challenge is ensuring it stays that way.
Iran will almost certainly try to reconstruct nuclear facilities in harder-to-reach locations. For example, Pickaxe mountain , a site widely believed to possess Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Iran will also likely endeavour to disperse missile production sites and rebuild its regional terrorist networks.
With its conventional capabilities diminished, it has every incentive to rely more heavily on terrorism, cyberattacks, transnational repression and using the Strait of Hormuz as a tool of economic coercion by leveraging its geographic control over the vital energy chokepoint.
And the Islamic Republic’s reach extends far beyond the Middle East.
Canada has already seen what happens when Tehran’s intelligence apparatus reaches into Western societies. United States intelligence has warned that Iranian intelligence services have worked with criminal networks to threaten, intimidate and target dissidents and other perceived enemies abroad. The Canadian government has also warned Canadians about a growing number of “state threats” from Iran and their activities in North America, including attacks targeting Iranian dissidents, journalists and Jewish and Israeli communities.
Iran’s tentacles extend into Western streets, financial institutions and communities. When Tehran cannot reach its enemies with missiles, it has demonstrated a willingness to use proxies, organized crime syndicates and covert operations instead. The Iranian regime and its proxies are linked to a highly coordinated “ criminals for hire ” network in Canada that has weaponized local street gangs and vulnerable youth to execute shootings, arson attacks, and intimidation campaigns against Jewish and American targets.
This is precisely the dimension of the Iranian threat that Western media and policymakers too often treat as a series of disconnected stories. Our experience monitoring Canadian news coverage has shown how easily Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism, regional proxies, nuclear ambitions and activities against dissidents in the West are reported separately, obscuring the strategic architecture connecting them.
We have repeatedly urged Canadian journalists and decision-makers to connect those dots rather than presenting the Islamic Republic as merely another Middle Eastern government with which the West has a disagreement.
Iran does not necessarily have to defeat its enemies. It has to outlast their political attention spans, and Canada has a role to play in preventing that dangerous outcome.
Ottawa’s 2024 designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist entity was important, but designation cannot substitute for muscular policy. Canada should work with allies to enforce sanctions aggressively, deport regime-linked officials, disrupt IRGC financing and ensure Canadian financial institutions and property markets do not become refuges for regime-connected wealth.
Canadian policy should distinguish clearly between the Islamic Republic and the Iranian people. Tens of millions of Iranians have lived under a regime that restricts political freedom, represses dissent and devotes enormous resources to military adventurism abroad. Many have risked imprisonment and death demanding freedoms Canadians regard as fundamental. Western governments should be extremely careful about rescuing their oppressors in the name of regional “stability.”
None of this requires an American invasion of Iran. Sending Western armies into a country of over 93 million people could turn an unpopular dictatorship into the defender of Iranian nationalism and produce consequences nobody can confidently predict.
The alternative is sustained pressure: keep sanctions tight, target the IRGC and its financial networks, help Iranians circumvent censorship, expose corruption and prevent Tehran from rebuilding the strategic capabilities that created this crisis.
There are several possible outcomes.
The worst would be a superficially attractive agreement that restores Iranian oil revenues and releases substantial frozen funds while leaving the regime free to reconstruct its military power. Five or ten years from now, the West could find itself confronting the same threat under considerably worse circumstances.
Another possibility is prolonged containment, with a weakened Islamic Republic surviving while its attempts to regenerate strategic capabilities are repeatedly frustrated.
And there remains the possibility that military humiliation, economic pressure, internal divisions and popular opposition eventually produce political change from within Iran itself. Nobody should assume this will happen. The Islamic Republic has spent nearly five decades building an extraordinarily effective apparatus of repression.
But Western governments are under no obligation to guarantee the Islamic regime’s survival.
The United States and Israel have changed the strategic balance. The question now is whether their allies have the patience to preserve it. Canada has a moral responsibility to help denying the Islamic Republic the resources it needs to rebuild its machinery of aggression and repression while leaving Iran’s future to Iranians themselves.
To reiterate, Iran does not need to win this war. It needs the West to lose interest in finishing what it started. Let’s not make that mistake.
National Post
Mike Fegelman is the executive director of HonestReporting Canada, a non-profit organization ensuring fair and accurate Canadian media coverage of Israel.
