“The President should appoint a Special Envoy to the People of Iran”
January 16, 2025
The American Mideast Coalition for Democracy believes the greatest overseas threat President Trump will face during his second term will not come from Russia, China, or even North Korea. It will come from the Islamic regime in Iran.
Any idea that the mullahs in Tehran are ready to make a deal with President Trump is profoundly mistaken. They do not chant “Death to America” at every public meeting just for the cameras. They believe that their regime will utterly destroy the United States, and they are planning each day how they can accomplish that end.
They cleverly use one regime official to dangle the notion of negotiations over their nuclear weapons program, while others tout the benefits of testing a nuclear explosive device.
President Trump needs to set out the boundaries of US policy toward the Islamic regime in Iran just as clearly as he did on January 3, 2020, when he ordered a U.S. drone to take out Iranian terror-master Qassem Suleymani.
AMCD Advisory Board member Kenneth R. Timmerman has a long history of working with Iranian pro-freedom forces and has mapped out a comprehensive approach toward Tehran for the next administration.
In a paper for the America First Policy Institute, Timmerman noted that “the only solution short of total war on Iran is to empower the Iranian people to change the regime.”
As a first step, Timmerman believes the incoming Trump administration should (and will) reimpose the “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran’s oil exports and banking sector.
But he adds that the new administration should couple pressure on the regime with “maximum support” for the Iranian people by enhancing U.S. government broadcasting into Iran, providing technology solutions to pro-freedom activists inside Iran, and by regularly meeting with Iranian opposition figures.
As the lynchpin for this new policy, he urges the president to appoint a “U.S. Special Envoy to the People of Iran.” This Special Envoy would coordinate U.S. government outreach to the opposition and promote their activities both at home and abroad.
The Iranian opposition has many flavors, and Ken Timmerman knows them all. As he writes in his recent book, The Iran House: Tales of Persecution, Revolution, War, and Intrigue (Bombardier Books, October 2024), over the past thirty years he has worked with Iranians “from all backgrounds: billionaires and paupers, royalty and republicans, Communists and conservatives.”
President-elect Trump’s special envoy for Russia and Ukraine, Lt. General (ret.) Keith Kellogg, recently met in Paris with the Iranian Mujahedin-e Khalq, or People’s Mujahedin, a Marxist Islamist group that has been rejected by the overwhelming majority of Iranian pro-freedom activists.
While General Kellogg quite correctly emphasized that the incoming administration was going to reimpose “maximum pressure” sanctions on the Iranian regime, his presence at an MEK event was greeted with dismay by pro-democracy advocates.
MEK promoters cleverly position their group as the Iranian “resistance,” a false claim that beguiles non-specialists into accepting their legitimacy. The group not only assassinated U.S. officers in Iran prior to the Revolution but allied with Saddam Hussein during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, a fact that most Iranians have never forgiven.
This is why AMCD believes the incoming administration should appoint Kenneth R. Timmerman as U.S. Special Envoy to the People of Iran.
Ken’s decades of experience with the Iranian opposition, as well as his work debriefing defectors from Iranian intelligence for families of 9/11 victims in their successful lawsuit against Iran, give him an unparalleled depth of understanding of the regime’s strengths and vulnerabilities.
The Trump administration should be elevating the profile of pro-freedom advocates in Iran, not encouraging – even by mistake – the neo-con fantasies of an armed insurrection spearheaded by an anti-democratic group such as the MEK.
Ken Timmerman knows how to navigate the shoals of the Iranian pro-freedom movement, and how to put America First. As the president’s Special Envoy to the People of Iran, he will give the president tremendous leverage over the Tehran regime to achieve our national security goals of keeping America safe from an Iranian nuclear weapon and regime terrorism.
AMCD urges President Trump to nominate Ken Timmerman as the first U.S. Special Envoy to the People of Iran.