The timing matters to Washington. Trump is right to test whether diplomacy can protect American forces, restore free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, and prevent another round of costly fighting. He is also right to keep military pressure available if Tehran refuses a serious agreement. But Iranian compliance cannot be measured only by missiles fired, ships attacked, or promises made at a negotiating table.

The regime’s treatment of its own people is also a security indicator. Tehran crushes domestic opposition so it can pursue confrontation abroad without accountability at home. Executions, mass arrests, and internet blackouts are not incidental to its foreign policy. They are part of the machinery that sustains it.

Iran’s leaders understand the connection. A population free to organize would question the vast resources poured into the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, proxy forces, missiles, and nuclear ambitions while ordinary Iranians endure inflation, shortages, and collapsing services. That is why the regime uses foreign conflict as cover to destroy organized dissent.

A deal that restrains Iran abroad while giving it a free hand to hang opponents at home would be incomplete. Worse, sanctions relief or diplomatic legitimacy without conditions could provide the resources and confidence to intensify repression. Washington might reduce one immediate danger while helping Tehran neutralize the force it fears most: the Iranian people.

Trump need not turn negotiations into an unlimited human rights agenda. He should set one narrow, measurable test: no diplomatic or economic concession until Tehran declares and observes a moratorium on protest-related executions.

Three steps would give that condition force.

First, the administration should publicly demand an immediate halt to the execution of the eight remaining defendants in the Alikhani Square case and to other protest-related executions. Tehran’s response would reveal more about its intentions than another carefully worded communique.

Second, the Treasury Department should impose and enforce targeted sanctions on judges, prosecutors, prison officials, and security commanders responsible for death sentences based on coerced confessions or grossly unfair trials. The targets should be perpetrators, not ordinary Iranians.

Third, Washington should expand support for secure communications and anti-censorship technology. An internet blackout is not merely information control. It isolates protesters so repression can proceed without witnesses.

JD VANCE HAS IRAN COMPLETELY BACKWARD: CONTINUITY IS CHAOS

Some will argue that adding executions to negotiations risks complicating an already difficult bargain. But ignoring them has a strategic cost. A leadership that believes it can escape accountability for closed mass trials and public hangings will have less reason to respect limits abroad. Human rights are not a side issue here — they are a test of whether pressure produces compliance.

Trump’s leverage is greatest before benefits are delivered. He should use it now. Peace with Iran cannot mean security for the regime abroad and death for its opponents at home.

Hamid Enayat is an Iranian political analyst and writer based in Paris.