Iranians in Tehran and beyond have been in the streets for nearly two weeks, protesting the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after she was arrested for wearing her headscarf too loosely. As with the many other anti-government protests in Iran over the last decade, Western hopes are high that this time it will be different, that a younger and more liberal generation of Iranians will finally succeed in overthrowing or at least significantly reforming the oppressive theocratic state that has controlled the country for nearly half a century.
I'm not sure those hopes will be realized, as much as I share them. But however these protests go, I do feel confident saying this: They do not vindicate "maximum pressure," the onerous sanctions regime instituted by former President Donald Trump when he withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and continued by President Joe Biden to this day. They do not prove that recent U.S. policy toward Iran has been moral or wise.
