Atlantic Council Parts Ways With Prominent Iran Apologist

After more than a decade providing a platform for some of D.C.’s most notorious Iranian regime apologists, the Atlantic Council is disbanding its longtime Iran program in the face of mounting protests against the hardline government in Tehran.

The think tank announced this month that it is ending its Future of Iran Initiative, which advocated for closer ties between the United States and the clerical Iranian government, and parting ways with initiative director Barbara Slavin, who used her academic perch to host pro-Iran lobbyists and publish flattering commentary about regime officials.

In its place, the Atlantic Council is launching a new program called the Iran Strategy Project that includes regime critics and Iranian human rights advocates, including Alliance for Rights of All Minorities’s Marjan Keypour, who has vocally supported the uprisings in Iran. The council has also added more conservative voices to its board, including Frances Townsend, who served as a homeland security adviser to former president George W. Bush, as well as Stuart Levey, a former Treasury Department undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence who helped implement a range of tough sanctions on the Iranian regime. The appointment of these voices is likely to take the Atlantic Council in a different direction, one at odds with Slavin’s longstanding efforts to foster close U.S. ties with Iran’s clerical leadership.

The news signals that the women’s rights protests erupting across Iran prompted the Atlantic Council to revisit its programming after years of leading the charge to normalize U.S. relations with the regime. Slavin’s Future of Iran project served as a key cog in the Obama administration’s self-described pro-Iran “echo chamber,” which flooded the media with positive propaganda in the lead-up to the 2015 nuclear deal. Slavin also publicly feuded with anti-regime activists and was pictured in 2017 giving the middle finger to pro-democracy protesters during a demonstration in Washington, D.C. The dissolution of Slavin’s pro-regime program drew applause from Iranian regime critics, who said the Atlantic Council must turn the page on its past work as the Iranian protest movement threatens to topple the hardline regime.

“Ms. Slavin represents the very worst of apologia for Iran’s dictatorship,” said Kaveh Shahrooz, an Iranian dissident and Toronto-based senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. “She, and the initiative she set up at the Atlantic Council, took money from people with business interests in Iran, met and took smiling photos with the worst high-ranking regime officials, and offered policy suggestions