Former British prime minister Tony Blair says Iran faces a “fundamental choice” between a hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and sanctions relief.
Speaking in New York, at the Council on Foreign Relations, Mr Blair set out a plan for the international community’s future dealings with Iran, particularly after the killing of the IRGC commander Qassem Suleimani last month.
“The regime can't afford the status quo, they need sanctions relief,” he said.
“The IRGC is critical to this. If it continues as under Suleimani, it will make impossible any such discussion with Iran. The Iranian regime therefore has a fundamental choice."
His suggestions to ease regional tension with Iran come after a report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, detailing the IRGC’s malign influence in the Middle East and across the world.
The report showed how the Guard's internal documents articulate a violent and extremist interpretation of Islam that portrays other religions, the West and regime opponents as mortal enemies of the religion.
It detailed how these manuals were being translated into English for the first time after they were widely disseminated online in Farsi.
Mr Blair said the Guard's influence in the region had been “balefully destructive” since 1979 and pointed to obvious interference in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and extreme groups all over the region as part of the group’s “work to destabilise existing Arab states”.
He was critical of the Iranian nuclear deal in 2015, saying its hope “that relaxation of sanctions would result in changed behaviour in the region” was misplaced.
But Mr Blair also criticised the current US administration’s policy of maximum pressure against Tehran, saying “there remains on all sides a danger of miscalculation”.
He concluded that allowing Iran to make new nuclear commitments while curbing its ballistic missile programme and ending its destabilising activities in the region would give the regime “a way out”.
Britain and other European nations have placed themselves as a arbiters between the US and Iran amid increasingly rising tension.
But talks on Tuesday between the EU’s foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani failed to make progress, with Mr Rouhani threatening to block UN nuclear inspectors from his countries facilities.
