Liam Fox: There Can Be No Lasting Peace in the Middle East While the Clerical Regime Remains in Power

Dr. Liam Fox, former UK Secretary of State for Defence and former Secretary of State for International Trade, said that decades of international experience with Iran’s ruling regime have conclusively demonstrated the failure of appeasement and the illusion of reform from within. The only genuine solution to the Iranian crisis, he argued, is a democratic change led by the Iranian people and their organized Resistance.

Fox said the 2015 nuclear agreement did not moderate the regime’s behavior. Instead, it released billions of dollars in frozen assets that were used to finance regional proxy groups, expand missile and drone programs, and continue nuclear ambitions, while systematic human rights abuses inside Iran remained unchanged.

He stressed that every new agreement with Tehran has merely postponed the crisis rather than resolved it. The regime cannot fundamentally reform itself because abandoning repression, terrorism, or regional expansion would mean abandoning the very pillars on which its survival depends. Believing that negotiations alone can permanently change its behavior ignores more than four decades of consistent experience.

Fox warned that a weakened regime is often more dangerous than a strong one. Governments facing profound domestic crises frequently resort to external confrontation to distract from internal instability. This explains Tehran’s repeated threats to close the Strait of Hormuz and its continued use of proxy forces to destabilize the wider region, including the Red Sea. Such actions threaten international shipping, global trade, energy security, and the world economy.

He emphasized that the international community has a responsibility to respond firmly to these threats and must never allow international waterways to become instruments of political blackmail.

At the same time, Fox underlined that Iran’s future cannot be imposed from outside. Freedom, he said, has never been granted by foreign powers but has always been achieved through the determination and sacrifice of the people themselves. The international community can help create favorable conditions, but only the Iranian people have the right and the ability to determine their own future.

He added that the democratic alternative based on popular sovereignty, separation of religion and state, and democratic republican governance offers the only realistic path beyond both the dictatorship of the mullahs and any return to the Shah’s authoritarian rule.

Fox concluded that the victory of the Iranian people would transform not only Iran but also the broader Middle East by removing one of the principal sources of regional conflict, terrorism, and instability, paving the way for a more secure, peaceful, and democratic future.