The International Committee in Search of Justice (ISJ) today released a landmark White Paper titled Time for a New Iran Policy: Breaking the False Dichotomy, offering one of the most comprehensive analyses to date of Iran’s accelerating domestic crisis, its illicit nuclear advances, its destabilizing regional agenda, and its global campaign of terrorism. The report concludes that decades of Western policy have been constrained by a false and dangerous binary, appeasement or war, that has produced neither stability nor reform.
Drawing on new findings, including revelations from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), documentation of Iran’s escalating human-rights abuses, and an exhaustive review of the regime’s internal vulnerabilities, the White Paper argues that sustained change in Iran can only emerge from the Iranian people themselves and their organized democratic resistance, not from foreign military intervention or concessions to Tehran’s ruling elite.
A Decisive Turning Point in 2025
The ISJ report underscores that the reimposition of all UN sanctions on Iran in September 2025 under the snapback mechanism of UN Security Council Resolution 2231 marked a decisive rupture in Western engagement. Contrary to expectations that renewed pressure might induce moderation, Tehran doubled down on repression at home and nuclear acceleration abroad, executing more than 2,400 people since August 2024, the highest rate of state killings in the regime’s 46-year history.
“The clerical regime’s answer to pressure has always been violence, deception, and defiance—not reform,” the White Paper states, stressing that neither diplomatic accommodation nor coercive military strikes have weakened the ruling establishment’s grip on power.
A Damning IAEA Assessment
Central to the analysis is the May 2025 IAEA report, described by ISJ as the most far-reaching and technically revealing document in the Agency’s 20-year assessment of Iran’s nuclear program. The report details undeclared sites, concealed nuclear material, and systematic sanitization efforts by Tehran. It also confirms that until the early 2000s, Iran operated a coordinated weapons-development infrastructure concealed from the international community.
According to the White Paper, these findings represent “a historic indictment of Iran’s two decades of denial, deception, and non-compliance,” and underscore the limits of any future nuclear agreement that treats the regime as a responsible negotiating party.
A Regime Fueling Instability Abroad—and Facing Crisis at Home
The ISJ report documents in extensive detail how Tehran’s regional interventions—from Lebanon and Syria to Iraq and Yemen—constitute a deliberate “outward strategy” designed to project power, export repression, and offset domestic fragility. The regime’s support for terrorism has extended deep into Europe and North America, including the 2018 Paris bomb plot and the attempted assassination of former European Parliament Vice President Alejo Vidal-Quadras in Madrid in 2023.
At the same time, Iran faces mounting internal crises: economic collapse, environmental disaster, accelerating brain drain, mass poverty, and an unprecedented collapse in public trust. Structural failures, including catastrophic water mismanagement and nationwide power outages, have triggered sustained grassroots protests across nearly every social sector, teachers, farmers, pensioners, truck drivers, and industrial workers.
“The Islamic Republic is confronting its most acute legitimacy crisis to date,” the report states. “Public anger is no longer episodic—it is systemic, organized, and unyielding.”
The Rise of Organized Resistance
ISJ’s White Paper emphasizes that five nationwide uprisings since 2017, culminating in the 2022-2023 movement led by women and youth, demonstrate that Iranian society, not external actors, is the decisive force for change. The report highlights the expanding activities of the Resistance Units, a network affiliated with the Iranian opposition movement that has carried out more than 3,000 targeted anti-repression operations and nearly 40,000 acts of civil defiance in the last year alone.
These units, the ISJ notes, represent “the most organized, sustained, and widespread challenge to the regime’s authority,” despite mass arrests, torture, and executions intended to dismantle them.
Debunking the “No Alternative” Myth
The White Paper rejects the oft-repeated claim that Iran would face chaos in a post-theocratic transition or that no viable alternative exists. Instead, the report points to the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a coalition of 450 democratic representatives of Iran’s diverse ethnic and religious communities, as a realistic, inclusive political structure capable of managing a transitional period and organizing free elections.
The NCRI’s political platform, grounded in universal human rights, gender equality, separation of religion and state, and a non-nuclear Iran, has earned support from thousands of lawmakers and public figures worldwide.
A New Framework: A People-Centered Iran Policy
ISJ’s White Paper ultimately argues that Western governments must move beyond the failed dichotomy of “engagement versus war.” The report urges policymakers to adopt a people-centered strategy that:
• Enforces international law and UN sanctions with consistency;
• Holds Tehran accountable for human-rights violations;
• Restricts the regime’s access to global financial systems;
• Supports Iran’s civil society and democratic opposition; and
• Recognizes the agency of the Iranian people as the primary drivers of change.
A Critical Moment for International Policy
“The path to a stable Middle East runs through a free Iran,” the report concludes. “Appeasement has failed, coercion alone is insufficient, and military intervention cannot create legitimacy. Only the Iranian people possess the capacity—and the will—to build a democratic, secular, and peaceful republic.”
ISJ
To read the whole report please see here:
https://isjcommittee.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Time-for-a-New-Iran-Policy-November-2025.pdf
