My political career began with the fall of the Shah. I watched the Iranian revolution of 1979 from close enough to see what most American policymakers missed at the time: that the men who took power in Tehran were not going to deliver the democracy the revolution had promised, and that the larger democratic coalition that had brought the Shah down was already being eliminated, one constituency at a time, before the year was out.

Forty-five years later, the Islamic Republic is still there. Eight American presidents have tried a version of the same thing, contain, sanction, negotiate, ignore, strike, negotiate again. The regime has outlasted every one of them.

It is now outlasting a ninth. President Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities last June, followed by months of strategic drift, has produced the same outcome as every other American Iran policy since Carter: the regime is weaker, more isolated, and still in power.

There is a reason. In four and a half decades of watching this file, I have learned that no serious regime transition in modern history has happened without an organized domestic alternative. Eastern Europe had Solidarity and the Charter movements. South Africa had the ANC. Iran has the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) and its broader coalition, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), led by Maryam Rajavi. American policy has spent forty-five years pretending it does not.

The regime has not. Last month, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights documented at least twenty-four political executions in Iran in the space of four weeks. Eight of those hanged were members of the PMOI. A third of the regime’s recent killings concentrated on a single organization is not a statistic. It is a confession. A regime that hangs PMOI members at this rate, in this proportion, is a regime telling the world, in its own language, on its own authority, which constituency it actually fears.

Among those executed was Vahid Bani-Amerian, hanged on the fourth of April. Days before his execution, he wrote a note from his cell describing fighter jets circling above the prison. His interrogators had demanded that he renounce the name Mojahed-e Khalq. He refused. The accusation under which he died was the same accusation under which Ayatollah Khomeini issued the 1988 fatwa that resulted in the execution of 30,000 political prisoners in a single summer, most of them PMOI supporters. Thirty-eight years separate the two killings. The charge has not changed. The regime’s calculation of who threatens it has not changed.

Neither has the American refusal to learn what the regime already knows.

In recent years, some commentators have suggested that the answer to the Islamic Republic is the son of the dictator the Iranians overthrew in 1979. As someone whose career began with that overthrow, I find the proposition implausible on its face.

Nations do not exit theocracy by re-entering monarchy. They exit it by completing the democratic revolution the theocracy stole. The Iranian people made that point themselves, in the streets of more than two hundred cities last winter, with a chant that left no room for misreading: death to the oppressor, be it Shah or Leader.

What they did leave room for is the alternative. On June 20, more than 100,000 Iranians and friends of Iran will gather in Paris for the annual rally of the National Council of Resistance of Iran. The NCRI has held this event each summer for nearly three decades. I have watched it from the beginning. The constituency has not changed. The leadership has not changed. The political program, embodied in its Ten-Point Plan for a secular, non-nuclear, democratic Iranian republic, has not changed. What has changed is the world around it.

It is the largest continuous public expression of organized Iranian democratic opposition anywhere in the world, and it has been so for thirty years. Washington has spent that period treating it as a curiosity. Tehran has spent that period trying to destroy it.

I have learned to trust the regime’s instincts more than Washington’s analysts. When the men who run the Islamic Republic concentrate a third of their executions on a single organization, they are telling the United States something American policy has refused to hear for four decades: that this organization is the one that will succeed them.

I do not expect this administration, or the next, to absorb that lesson quickly. But anyone in Washington who wants a serious Iran policy, rather than another decade of the same one, should be paying attention to who will be in Paris on June 20.

Forty-five years of watching has taught me where to look.

McColm is the President of Institute for Democratic Strategies. He was the Executive Director of Freedom House (1989 – 1993).