“The essence of oligarchical rule,” George Orwell wrote in 1984, “is the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living.” For nearly four decades, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei presided over exactly that. He did not build the Islamic Republic of Iran. He inherited it from its founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who in 1979 led a revolution that deposed a U.S.
The fate of a 2,500-year-old nation and its 93 million inhabitants rests, for now, in the hands of Donald Trump.
On at least eight occasions over the past three weeks, Trump encouraged Iranian protesters to go into the streets, assuring them that the United States had their back and that “help is on the way.” He threatened that if the Iranian regime killed protesters, the U.S. was “locked and loaded” to take action.
Forty-seven years ago, Iran had a revolution that replaced a U.S.-allied monarchy with an anti-American theocracy. Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran may be on the verge of a counterrevolution.
History suggests that regimes collapse not from single failures but from a fatal confluence of stressors.
Tipping points in the fortunes of opaque, authoritarian regimes are often predicted but never predictable. The rigged “election” of Ebrahim Raisi, an uncharismatic, 60-year-old hard-line cleric, as Iran’s next president has the potential to be such a moment, although its significance will be fully understood only in hindsight.