Iran’s former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi cautioned that the timing of US President Joe Biden’s stated desire to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is a strategic error with regard to the Tehran regime.

In an interview with Israel Hayom, the exiled son of the late shah, criticized the mistaken contention that the mullahs were rational actors expressing that the “regime’s destructive and destabilizing actions are not conducive to any long-term relations with the free world.”

Pahlavi argued that Biden’s precipitate determination to rejoin the so-called 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal, which his former boss President Barack Obama saw as the crowning achievement of his foreign policy, telegraphed to the Ayatollahs – whom he said would “never change” – that they could act with impunity.

“It is blackmailing the free world,” he said of the regime. “The only sensible solution to American and regional security concerns and the Iranian peoples’ myriad problems lies in supporting the struggle for freedom and democracy in Iran.”

In a wide-ranging interview, the former crown prince praised the signing of the Abraham Accords – the normalization deals between Israel and a number of Arab countries – comparing the opportunities now afforded citizens of these states as opposed to the “suffering and misery of the ‘Axis of Resistance’ countries – my Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria.”

He added that as long as the Ayatollahs were in power in Tehran, the Islamic Republic would never recognize the State of Israel or normalize relations with it.

Pahlavi maintained that “unlike most countries,” the regime identifies itself by what it is opposed to, not what it supports. In his assessment, so many internal changes had already taken place in Iran that he thought the ultra-conservative theocracy – marked by environmental, economic and health failures would continue to come under increasing pressure from within Iran.