The foreign-lobbying blind spot in Project 2025's Iran and Venezuela policy
Project 2025's State Department chapter repeats debunked claims about the JCPOA while omitting the role of foreign lobbying — particularly by the MEK — in shaping its Iran posture. Its Venezuela section embraces maximalist pressure without addressing the strategic costs of regime-change advocacy or the oversight gaps that allow foreign influence to distort U.S. policy.
The Iran section of Project 2025's State Department chapter rests on a factual error: it claims the Obama administration gave 'hundreds of billions of dollars' to Iran. This conflates sanctions relief — frozen assets released under the JCPOA — with direct cash payments, a distortion that even the Trump administration's own Treasury Department never made. The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Iran complied with JCPOA limits until the U.S. withdrawal in 2018, after which Iran accelerated enrichment. The deal's failure to moderate Iranian behavior is now a common criticism, but the deal's defenders — and IAEA records — show it did achieve its primary objective: blocking Iran's pathways to a bomb while inspectors were on the ground.
What the chapter omits entirely is the foreign lobbying machinery behind the regime-change advocacy it implicitly endorses. The National Council of Resistance of Iran, the political umbrella for the MEK (a group the U.S. designated as a foreign terrorist organization until 2012), has spent millions on U.S. lobbying to push for the overthrow of the Iranian government. The political scientist Ben Freeman, writing for the Quincy Institute, documented how the NCRI used a 2023 House resolution expressing support for Iranian protesters as a vehicle for its agenda. Project 2025 does not disclose this influence, nor does it grapple with the strategic risks of outsourcing Iran policy to a non-democratic exile group with a history of cult-like internal governance. For Venezuela, the chapter echoes the maximalist posture that has produced eight years of failed sanctions, a refugee crisis, and no regime change — while making no mention of the humanitarian waivers or oversight mechanisms needed to prevent sanction-driven starvation from becoming U.S. policy by default.
A restraint-doctrine alternative would: (1) return to verifiable nuclear limits via the JCPOA framework, reasserting the arms-control inspections that the Trump administration abandoned; (2) require public disclosure of foreign lobbying contracts from any group advocating for U.S. intervention in Iran or Venezuela; and (3) replace blanket sanctions with targeted measures that include robust humanitarian exemptions and an annual congressional certification of their strategic effectiveness. This does not mean normalizing the Maduro or Iranian regimes — it means protecting democratic decision-making from foreign influence and ensuring U.S. force posture serves American national security, not the lobbying budgets of exile groups.
The humanitarian alternative
Replace maximalist regime-change rhetoric with a restraint-based approach: reinstate the JCPOA framework for verified nuclear limits, mandate disclosure of foreign lobbying in all Iran policy reviews, and focus Venezuela policy on humanitarian aid and multilateral diplomatic engagement rather than pressure campaigns that empower authoritarian narratives.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 7: Intelligence Community (pp 214-216)"— 181 — Department of State Instead of pressuring the Iranian theocracy to move toward democracy, the Obama Administration threw the brutal regime an economic lifeline by giving hundreds of billions of dollars to the Iranian government and providing other sanc- tions relief. This economic relief did not moderate the regime, but emboldened its brutality, its efforts to expand its nuclear weapons programs, and its support for global terrorism. Former President Obama has admitted his lack of support for the Green Movement during his Administration was an error and blamed it on poor advisors—yet those same advisors are involved with the Biden Administration’s insistence on reducing pressure on the theocracy and resurrecting a nuclear deal. The next Administration should neither preserve nor repeat the mistakes of the Obama and Biden Administrations. The correct future policy for Iran is one that acknowledges that it is in U.S. national security interests, the Iranian people’s human rights interests, and a broader global interest in peace and stability for the Iranian people to have the democratic government they demand. This decision to be free of the country’s abusive le…"