WarSclerotic

Associated Press

Iranian demonstrators march against the regime. Was it all for nothing?

Had any of that happened, it’s just possible that Iran’s leaders might have hesitated before moving ahead with their bloody crackdown and, in hesitating, given Iran’s democratic opposition the opening it needed to sustain itself. But it didn’t happen. In those critical June days, as the regime wobbled, the Obama administration opted to ease the regime’s fears instead of multiplying them. And instead of creating leverage for himself, the president conceded it preemptively in hopes of currying favor for a nuclear deal.

A year on, we are living with the consequences of his failure. The hoped-for nuclear deal never materialized. The “sanctions with bite” that the administration promised turn out, on close inspection, to have no bite. The international consensus—as well as the consensus in the U.S. foreign policy establishment—is shifting away from the view that Iran must not be allowed to get nuclear weapons to the idea that a nuclear Iran can be “contained.” The regime is more emboldened than ever—and much closer to a nuclear capability. Israel, the one country that might yet take action, is more isolated than ever.

Worst of all, the Green movement is, if not extinguished completely, little more than a flickering ember. The three million Iranians who marched for freedom last June may have to wait another generation for a similar opportunity.

I realize this view is disputed by those who believe that Iranian people power can assert itself again. Writing in these pages Saturday, Michael Ledeen of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies described signs of mass discontent and regime weakness. “Sooner or later there will be a showdown, most likely sooner,” Mr. Ledeen wrote. “The regime is riven by internal conflict, and some of the past heroes of the Islamic Republic are openly siding with the Greens.”

I hope Mr. Ledeen is right. But I doubt it. If mass discontent alone were sufficient to topple a regime, Stalin and Mao would not have died in their beds, and Cuba, Burma and North Korea would be free countries today. And if regime factionalism were evidence of an impending fall, the Soviet Union should not have survived long past Khrushchev’s feud with Beria, or Brezhnev’s with Khrushchev. But it did.

In fact, revolutions rarely succeed without the (grudging) consent of the regimes they aim to replace. It’s a question of will. Had the leaders of the Soviet Union wished to carry on indefinitely, Mikhail Gorbachev could have easily invoked the Brezhnev Doctrine and ordered Warsaw Pact forces to fire on protestors in East Berlin or Prague. But except for an abortive attempt to prevent the independence of Lithuania, he had lost the necessary appetite for blood. In Iran, it wasn’t the Ayatollah Khomeini who brought down the Shah. The Shah simply chose to leave the country rather than fire on the crowds in the street.

Revolutions are also a question of luck and circumstance. In Berlin in 1989, a befuddled East German Politburo member misread his instructions and announced that East Germans were henceforth free to travel to the West. Thus—thus!—did the Wall come down. Two years later in Moscow, some visibly nervous coup plotters took to a stage to announce Gorbachev’s early retirement. Their shaky performance allowed Boris Yeltsin to rally Russians against them. It helped that Yeltsin didn’t have, in George H.W. Bush, an American president who refused to “meddle” in the country’s internal affairs.

Finally, successful revolutions require charismatic and competent leadership. The United States had it in George Washington; the Bolsheviks in V.I. Lenin. A year ago, opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi could have led the crowds in Tehran in a march on Iran’s presidential palace. The march would likely have been unstoppable. But he demurred. Maybe it’s no wonder: A movement that aims to topple a regime built on a cult of martyrdom is unlikely to produce many martyrs of its own.

It has been said that the Soviet Union only collapsed when the generation of leaders that had come of age during the heroic period of Russian resistance to the Nazis gave way to those who, like Gorbachev, had not fought in the war.

By contrast, the willful men who were Khomeini’s student minions and who now form the hard core of the regime are still mostly in their 50s. They are energetic and determined to preserve the historic legacy they believe is theirs. And that’s true no matter how much they may be despised by the 60% of Iranians who weren’t even born at the time of the revolution.

So don’t expect a second Iranian revolution any time soon. On the contrary, expect a regime that will be more repressive at home, more aggressive abroad, and more committed than ever to a radical theology that substitutes for popular legitimacy. This is a regime that will not stop a step short of becoming a nuclear power, and that will pounce on weakness when it sees it.

A year ago, President Obama had a fighting chance to alter the dynamics of Iranian politics. As with Jimmy Carter before him, he flubbed it. We will pay the price of that historic mistake for years to come.