The Trump Administration is now signalling to its allies and Iranian dissidents that its new policy—to choke Tehran economically and publicly support local protesters—can topple the revolutionary government in Iran. “We are now very realistic in being able to see an end of the regime in Iran,” Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, said at the annual gathering of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the controversial exile group, in Paris on Saturday. In December, sporadic protests erupted in Iran in response to unemployment and the strict dress code for women. During his speech, Giuliani compared Trump’s support for the protests to President Reagan’s support for the opponents of Communist rule in Eastern Europe in the nineteen-eighties.

“Just a few months ago, the President of the United States—about whom there’s a lot of controversy, about whether he should tweet or not—took out his little phone and he tweeted, and he supported the protesters, like Ronald Reagan did for the protesters in Poland when Solidarity marched against Communism,” Giuliani said. “And what happened there? Communism fell. Poland is free. The Iron Curtain evaporated. And the Berlin Wall was chopped down. That will happen now.” The collapse of the Islamic Republic of Iran, he said, “is around the corner.”

Giuliani represents the President in the probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and its possible ties to the Trump campaign. The former mayor of New York City does not speak for Trump on foreign policy. But his remarks—especially comparing U.S. policy on Iran to U.S. policy on the Soviet Union thirty years ago—were later echoed by Newt Gingrich, who was also at the event. Gingrich is one of Trump’s closest political allies, and his wife, Callista Gingrich, is the President’s Ambassador to the Vatican. “The Soviet Union looked unbelievably powerful, and then one day it disappeared,” Gingrich said. “The fact is that the Khamenei regime is much weaker than the Soviet Union ever was . . . . Freedom will come.”

In one of many ironies, the N.C.R.I. is dominated by the M.E.K., or Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a cultlike movement that blends Marxist and Islamic tenets. It was among the first groups added to the United States’ list of foreign terrorist organizations, in 1997. It is still held responsible for the murder of U.S. military personnel, an attempted kidnapping of an American Ambassador, and other violent attacks in Iran before the Revolution in 1979. It participated in the Revolution but eventually split with the clerics. The M.E.K. was harbored by the former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, which is one of several reasons that it has limited support inside of Iran today. Many of its fighters were relocated to Albania after the American invasion. It was removed from the U.S.’s terrorist list in 2012. Speakers at M.E.K. rallies, in Paris and elsewhere, have reportedly been paid tens of thousands of dollars for their appearances.

The fiery comments from Giuliani and Gingrich follow recent talks between the new national-security adviser, John Bolton, and his European counterparts about the next steps in the U.S.’s foreign policy on Iran. On May 8th, Trump withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and unilaterally restored sanctions on the country, in defiance of the deal’s five cosponsors—Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia. Bolton informed the Europeans that Washington intends to steadily escalate diplomatic pressure and impose additional economic sanctions on Iran throughout the summer and fall. The restored sanctions go into effect in two waves in August and November, and will also punish foreign companies and banks that continue to do business with Iran. The five other major powers have resisted U.S. pressure to join in. The Europeans came away from the talks with Bolton convinced that the Administration’s goal is to foster regime change, an outcome that Bolton had publicly endorsed as recently as January. (Bolton, who became the national-security adviser in March, had been a speaker at the annual N.C.R.I. meeting eights times, and was a keynote speaker last year.)

The Administration’s goal now is to cut off the Islamic Republic’s ability to export oil, its prime source of revenue and foreign exchange. The sanctions deadline is November 4th, which happens to coincide with the takeover, in 1979, of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. (Fifty-two American diplomats were held for fourteen months.) As part of its new strategy, the White House has quietly been lobbying Saudi Arabia to make up for any shortfall that could abruptly hike the global price of oil—up to ninety dollars a barrel, as some experts claim, a more than twelve per cent increase from the current price. Last year, Iran was the world’s sixth-largest oil exporter; it ranks fourth among the world’s proven oil reserves. OPEC countries could have difficulty compensating for the loss of Iranian exports.

On Saturday, President Trump appealed directly to King Salman. Afterward, he tweeted, “Just spoke to King Salman of Saudi Arabia and explained to him that, because of the turmoil & disfunction in Iran and Venezuela, I am asking that Saudi Arabia increase oil production, maybe up to 2,000,000 barrels, to make up the difference...Prices to [sic] high! He has agreed!” Since Trump took office, ties between Washington and Riyadh have deepened over their joint opposition to the revolutionary regime in Tehran.

In distinctly undiplomatic tweets during the past two weeks, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has also gone public with support for the protests in Iran. The first featured a graph showing the increased pattern of demonstrations in Iran during the past year and a half. “Hmm… Can this be explained?” Pompeo wrote. Three other tweets lambasted the “criminal regime” for thousands of arrests, “plundering” oil wealth on proxy wars, and backing militant movements, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, beyond Iran’s borders while Iranian families were struggling. Pompeo also called for regime change in Iran when he was in Congress.

The theocracy clearly faces growing woes. The recent economic protests have spread to thirty of Iran’s thirty-one provinces, although they have not been nearly as large as the Green Movement uprising, in 2009, when millions took to the streets to oppose alleged voter fraud in the Presidential election. The women’s protests in response to laws requiring hijab head coverings were striking but relatively small. The U.S. moves, however, have already affected the Iranian economy. Many foreign companies—big oil companies, such as France’s Total, and the airplane manufacturers Boeing and Airbus—are ending agreements that they made after the nuclear deal went into effect in 2016. The value of the rial has plummeted this year by some forty per cent, leading the government to impose restrictions on access to foreign exchange.