I am Persian. From what I gather, the middle-plus class here still mostly believes that changing the regime is costly and risky (especially since it might very well lead to a civil war, as the regime has no humanity and has shown that it will kill every single one of the people to survive). These sanctions certainly help align our incentives more with the US agenda, but they do not seem to be enough after all. Obama's strategy was definitely a failure, as well; It simply gave power and legitimacy to the Islamic regime and only got temporary limits in return, limits that ultimately did not abate either domestic abuse or extraterritorial meddling. In the end, dictators know that the Western block is finicky, unstable, and short-termish; This makes it so that high-pressure strategies do not work. I do not know of a solution, frankly; Most of my peers see immigration as the only viable solution. But the blame of the quagmire mostly lies with the democrats and the EU. If they had committed to the high-pressure strategy from the Obama era, a much better compromise would have been reachable with the IR. (The democrats+EU mostly sided with the IR in recent protests as well, just to spite Trump. They are only good for virtue signalling, and do not help the oppressed where it matters.) Western democracies generally are very bad game-theoretic agents; They play repeated games as if they are oneshots.

PS: Imagine if the USA sponsored Telegram MTPROTO proxies (and other anti-censorship tools). That'd deal a huge blow to the IR, and make the people more US-friendly as well. Does anyone know why they don't? It's an obvious LHF ...