All eyes are now on next week’s highly-anticipated, and hotly contested, national election. In recent days, we’ve witnessed a flurry of media reports about how malign actors like Russia, China and Iran are seeking to shape U.S. political discourse ahead of that pivotal vote. 

In order for the US to proactively shape the contours of the debate within the Iranian opposition it needs to lay out what sort of government it wants in Tehran, and its expectations of the actors that will play a part in bringing about this change. And, given the growing indicators that the Islamic Republic is approaching a fundamental political and social transition, the sooner Washington does so, the better. 

In the Fall of 2023, Iranians from all walks of life took to the streets to vent their rage at their country’s ruling clerical regime. The immediate cause for their anger was the September 2022 death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of regime security forces for the crime of improperly wearing her Islamic headscarf, or hijab. Quickly, however, what began as grassroots unrest over regime brutality transformed into something more: a fundamental rejection of the Islamic Republic’s religious system of government. And as the protests went on, hopes rose in the West that they might, at long last, coalesce into a real challenge to the country’s four-plus decades of draconian clerical rule. 

At present, Chinese coercion is met largely with a playbook of defensive measures. The Chinese are able to choose the time and location of their action, and the recipient country busies itself scrambling to contain the fallout. China therefore has the initiative, while the targeted country — often in conjunction with the U.S. — mostly tries to mitigate the impact. As a result, it’s tempting to assume that China holds more cards than it actually does. And it’s equally easy for the U.S. to forget the extent of its own leverage over China in the exact same manner.

It is hard to think of a United Nations agency with a more glaring failure in its core mission than the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, more commonly known as UNIFIL — and there has certainly been no shortage of contenders this year.