U.S. Has Chance To Support Activists for Freedom in Iran
“Window of opportunity” with aging Khamenei, dissident says in Editors interview

America and opponents of the Iranian regime have a brief chance to change Iran now or may have to wait decades for another opportunity, a prominent activist for a free Iran said in an interview with The Editors.
Mehdi Yahyanejad, 49, is the founder of Balatarin, a Persian internet bulletin board similar to Reddit that is blocked and banned in Iran though accessible there via proxy servers. He has a doctorate in physics from MIT.
“There is a window of opportunity with Iran as long as the current supreme leader is alive. He’s 85,” Yahyanejad said, referring to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has ruled Iran since 1989. “As long as he is alive there is a chance to push for meaningful change.”
Yahyanejad said Khamenei’s successor could seek direct negotiations with America and receive some sanctions relief that could result in granting the Islamic regime “another 30 years or more of lifetime.”
“It will be a regime meddling in all sorts of things in the region,” Yahyanejad said. “That’s my take, that’s why I’m worrying.”
He said he had little confidence in “short lived agreements” such as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or Iran nuclear deal announced by the Obama administration. “I’m not in favor of any of these short term agreements,” he said, describing the Iranian regime as “highly ideological” and motivated to get around any agreements. The supreme leader is “not the one doing the handshakes,” Yahyanejad said. “He always sends someone else and doesn’t have to convince his radical supporters that they have to change their anti-American mindset.”
“Making these agreements really is not helpful,” Yahyanejad said.
Yahyanejad said that Iran getting a nuclear bomb would change the situation even if it doesn’t use it in an attack. “Once they have it, it would give them confidence to do all kinds of things they are not doing now,” he said. Even if there is only a ten percent or twenty percent chance of Iran using the bomb, “do you really want to live under that sword of probability?”
Yahyanejad said that as opposed to the government, a majority of Iranians have shifted away from political Islam and instead favor a secular administration.
Who would run a post-Islamic Republic Iran? “I believe there are enough people inside Iran to run it,” Yahyanejad said. They may not be household names now, because “the regime has been persecuting anyone who has potential.”
But he says a combination of prominent dissidents and mid-level managers inside the current bureaucracy could prevent Iran from descending into chaos. He said it is ultimately a decision up to the Iranian people who they want to choose democratically. He said one post-regime challenge could be responding to the accumulated demands from various persecuted ethnic and religious minorities, and he mentions the importance of “inclusive language” to bring them aboard.
Who would be the partners of this new Iran? “A free Iran is mostly going to look toward America,” Yahyanejad predicted. It would also develop a relationship with China, a “a hard-to-ignore big economic power,” and cultivate economic and scientific ties with Israel.
“The majority of Iranians want to have a good relationship with Israel. It makes sense,” Yahyanejad said.
Yahyanejad founded the Reddit-like website called Balatarin in 2006. The Iranian government blocked it, and the site was also targeted with sophisticated cyberattacks. He’s been working “mostly on Internet freedom issues” related to Iran and also on “ideas on how Iranians can organize using technology to defeat the regime”—satellite tv, internet access via Elon Musk’s Starlink.
His theory of change involves “political pressure” to lend “solidarity and support to activists inside and outside Iran.” The key, he said, is “supporting the confidence of the activists and damaging the confidence of the regime.”
Because of the recent defeats of Hezbollah and the Assad regime in Syria, which were both Iranian allies or proxies, “we’re at one of the lowest points in terms of their confidence. We have to benefit from it.”
President Trump and the new administration can help, Yahyanejad said, by stopping “wrong signals” that they are still engaging the regime in Tehran, and instead “giving the right signals” to the opposition that they are “supporting them to overthrow the regime.”
“They can speed things up,” Yahyanejad said.
Iran is very different from Iraq, he said. “Iranians had their revolution. They experienced radical Islam. They've learned how damaging that was.”
As for the idea that the U.S. can withdraw from involvement in the Middle East, somehow extract itself and ignore the region, Yahyanejad called that naive in light of recent events: “October 7 shows you can’t just pack and go and assume nothing’s going to happen.”
If a Trump administration is wary of “regime change” because of its association with the Iraq War, “let’s find different language,” Yahyanejad suggested: “major support for freedom activists inside Iran to be able to bring that change themselves.”
“So far, that hasn’t been done,” he said. The new administration in Washington has an opportunity to reevaluate and change course.