In the 1980s, the Soviet Union entered a period of gradual decline, even as it still appeared to be a stable superpower from the outside. Its frequent leadership changes reflected not just a succession of individual leaders, but an aging and stagnant political system, an ideology that had lost much of its force, and an economy trapped in deep dysfunction.
Facing this reality was an American president who changed the strategy of containment that had long dominated Washington’s approach to Moscow. Armed with a deep belief in the righteousness of the American cause and an infectious optimism, president Ronald Reagan famously declared that “the march of freedom and democracy” would “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.”
The “evil empire,” as he later called the Soviet Union, was not, in Reagan’s eyes, a permanent feature of the international order. It was a decaying ideological regime whose weaknesses could and should be exploited. The West, he believed, should stop merely containing the Soviet Union and instead focus on defeating it.
Many rightly credit Reagan with making a significant contribution to the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet they sometimes forget that alongside his deep idealism, he was also a cautious pragmatist who worked in every possible way to reach understandings with Moscow in order to reduce the risk of nuclear catastrophe.
Reagan therefore operated along two parallel tracks, which in his eyes were never in contradiction: intensifying political, economic, military, and ideological pressure on the Soviet regime on the one hand, while responsibly managing the nuclear risk through dialogue, arms control, and the pursuit of understandings with Moscow on the other.
Reagan believed this integrated approach was essential to ensuring America’s security until the inevitable fall of the Soviet Union – the precise timing of which, in his view, only divine providence could know.
Reagan’s skillful statecraft sends us a signal from the past about the strategy now required toward Tehran. The reality is simple: as long as this regime remains in power in one form or another, it will continue to pose a grave threat to Israel.
Iran bears direct or indirect responsibility for a substantial share of Israel’s core security challenges. It is the “evil empire” of our time. Therefore, much like Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union, Israel must define the acceleration of the Iranian regime’s fall as a clear and primary strategic objective.
Israel should strengthen Iran's opposition
This is a necessary goal, but it is also highly ambitious, difficult to bound in time, and impossible to achieve through kinetic tools alone. Israel should advance a series of efforts aimed at strengthening the Iranian opposition, identifying and developing ties with elements inside the existing power structures, and undermining the foundations of the regime while deepening tensions among its centers of power.
Every tool, overt and covert, used to advance this objective – military, economic, cyber, information, and influence operations – should be judged by one central question: Will this action weaken the Islamic Republic of Iran?
At the same time, Israel and the United States must manage the gravest strategic risk posed by Tehran: the possibility that it will use its stockpile of enriched uranium to secretly build a nuclear bomb. Under current conditions, there is no way to guarantee that Iran will not attempt to do so, especially given its extraordinary motivation to deter Israel and the US from further efforts to bring down the regime.
This is an urgent objective that must be advanced, even at the price of limited agreements with Iran on the nuclear issue – above all, the removal of enriched uranium from its territory. The obvious price of such agreements would be sanctions relief or the unfreezing of funds.
Such an arrangement would provide the Iranian regime with a vital injection of oxygen. However, if it verifiably removes the most immediate nuclear danger, it may be a painful but necessary price to pay.
This is not a contradiction in terms, as Reagan showed us. Israel’s overall strategy must account for the structural uncertainty involved in assessing the precise timing of regime collapse, however unstable and rotten it may be – and the Iranian regime is both.
In the Soviet analogy, we do not know whether we are in 1982, 1985, 1989, or 1991. Israel must act to accelerate the collapse of the Iranian regime while ensuring that it does not acquire nuclear weapons in the meantime.
Reagan did not know exactly when the Soviet Union would fall, but he understood that a rotten system should not be treated as a permanent fact of history. At the same time, he understood that even a declining regime could still possess the ability to destroy cities and drag the world into catastrophe.
This is the lesson Israel and the United States must apply to Iran: do not wait for the regime to fall; instead, act to bring that day closer; and do not assume that the regime’s weakness is enough to neutralize the dangers it poses.
Applying Ronald Reagan’s deft statecraft to Iran is complex, elusive, and far from guaranteed, but it is better than the available alternatives.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI). In the Israeli Defense Intelligence, he served as head of the Hezbollah and Lebanon Branch (2022–2024) and later as senior adviser to the director of IDI (2024–2026).