Has the world’s richest man – Elon Musk, inadvertently stumbled into an Iranian minefield? It was reported in the New York Times that Musk had met with Amir Saeid Iravani, the Iranian regime’s ambassador to the UN, on Monday 11 November. The meeting apparently took place in Iravani’s private residence in New York, although both the UN, and the Biden administration stated that they were unaware of the encounter. Indeed, the Iranian regime’s foreign minister categorically denied the meeting had taken place. Musk has been appointed to president-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet to head up a new cost cutting department. His role does not involve foreign policy. Nevertheless, he has already intervened in a joint telephone conversation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, so he appears ready to stray into territory better allocated to Marco Rubio, the Florida Senator appointed by Trump as his Secretary of State. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said: “We do not comment on reports of private meetings that did or did not occur.”

Both Donald Trump and Marco Rubio are known for their hawkish views on the theocratic Iranian regime. So, the meeting between Musk and Iravani, if it did occur, has raised some eyebrows, particularly after the FBI reported they were investigating an Iranian plot to assassinate Trump during the presidential election campaign. There was widespread media speculation that the tech billionaire was seeking ways of easing tensions between Iran and the incoming 47^th president. It was reported that the meeting had lasted for over one hour, leading to fears that Iravani would be dangling major Iranian business-deal carrots to attract Trump, in exchange for a guarantee that tough economic sanctions imposed by the US would be lifted. If that was indeed what happened in the clandestine meeting, it would be a typical and well-worn strategy lifted straight from the mullahs’ playbook. There have been numerous occasions in the past when the Iranian regime has offered to make major concessions, like curtailing their nuclear program, in return for the easing of Western sanctions. In every case Western appeasers have been duped. The mullahs are past masters at deceit, trickery and fraud.

Maybe Elon Musk thinks that the new Iranian president, widely acclaimed as a ‘moderate’ in Western media reports, is a potential soft touch. He should think again. President Masoud Pezeshkian has presided over 461 executions, including 15 women and even one execution in public, since he took office in August. The frenzy of hangings is designed to terrify the rebellious public.  It represents a 75% increase in executions over the same period last year when Ebrahim Raisi, the so-called ‘Butcher of Tehran’, was president. Pezeshkian is no moderate and in any case is a puppet president, blindly carrying out the orders of the regime’s Supreme Leader, the elderly and sociopathic Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Nor should Musk regard Iravani as a temperate interlocutor. During the nationwide uprising that raged across Iran in 2022, following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, the young Kurdish woman arrested for not wearing her hijab properly, the UN held a special session at the request of the Americans, to condemn the fact that 750 unarmed protesters had been killed and over 30,000 detained. Iravani addressed journalists at the UN headquarters in New York, attacking the Americans for daring to interfere in his country’s internal affairs. Rather than signalling his regime’s willingness to carry out reforms, or listen to the voices of the protesters and ease the crackdown, he unleashed a torrent of abuse against what he described as “violent and terrorist acts” and made the absurd claim that the Islamic Republic of Iran “has always been and continues to be committed to the promotion and protection of human rights,” adding that “freedom of expression and peaceful assembly” are taken for granted in Iran’s constitution. Iravani then walked out without answering questions from journalists.

Trump and Marco Rubio are well aware of the pitfalls of easing sanctions on Iran. Enabling the Iranian regime to bolster its collapsing economy will not put bread on the table for 85 million beleaguered Iranians. It will, however, help to fund the theocratic regime’s warmongering proxies like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, the Shi’ia militias in Iraq, and Bashar al-Assad in Syria. It will sustain the blacklisted Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and their sponsorship of international terror and conflict, and it will prop up the mullahs and allow them to continue their tyrannical repression of their own people. No kind of pledge or promise from the mullahs will ever be worth the paper it’s printed on.

Donald Trump and Marco Rubio should explain to Elon Musk that the West has pursued a course of engagement with Tehran, rooted in the misguided belief that dialogue and concessions could moderate the mullahs’ menacing behaviour, for far too long. This approach has not only failed to achieve its objectives it has, in fact, emboldened the regime. Tehran has exploited this leniency to entrench its power, expand its influence across the Middle East, accelerate its nuclear weapons program, and suppress its own people, with impunity. The only path to meaningful and lasting change lies in the complete overthrow of the fascist theocracy, an outcome that can only be achieved by the Iranian people themselves, not by military conflict.

Instead of negotiating with the Iranian ambassador to the UN, Elon Musk should be talking to Mrs Maryam Rajavi, the charismatic president-elect of the main democratic opposition movement to the mullahs, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). He should talk to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Louie Freeh, former FBI Director, or General James Jones, Former US National Security Advisor. They will enlighten Mr Musk on the reality of the Iranian regime and the need for the incoming Trump administration to back the Iranian people in their bid to overthrow this evil tyranny and retore freedom, peace, justice and democracy to Iran.