Having drastically lost influence in domestic political tussling, Iran’s Reformists, staunch advocates against hard-liner dominance, are being further pushed to the brink by the United States.

Iran's centrist president, Hassan Rouhani, elected on the backs of Reformist voters, has been losing support since the US decision to pull out of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and to re-impose harsh economic sanctions against Iran. Meanwhile, Iranian opposition groups abroad are stepping up criticism of the very idea of reform. This comes as the Reformist discourse struggles under the weight of suppression at home on the one hand and the fallout of the movement’s own strategic mistakes on the other.

“There has been an all-out campaign in the media whose policies are designed in Washington, and on social media as well, against Reformists and the notion of reform here in general,” Hassan Asadi Zeydabadi, a Reformist activist, told Al-Monitor. “Ultimately, it is the popular support for the Reformists that keeps the US away from [realizing] the collapse of the regime, establishing a puppet government or even the dissolution of Iran, which is in line with what its regional partners, Saudi Arabia and Israel, want. They have come to the conclusion that more than anything, they need to remove this obstacle.”

Having seemingly revived “regime change” as official US policy, the Donald Trump administration’s stance on the nuclear deal, people close to the US president say, is ultimately aimed at increasing economic pressure on the Iranian people so they will rise up and overthrow the Islamic Republic.