Revolution without revolutionaries

Why Iran won’t collapse the way Washington expects

Car Bomb, Fernando Botero, 1999

If liberal supporters of the 2003 Iraq war were searching for their Spanish Civil War moment, today’s neoconservatives seem to view events in Iran through the prism of the European revolutions of 1989. As Donald Trump himself put it in a recent address, “to the people of Iran, rise up and seize your country.” A few missile strikes are launched and the expectation in Washington seems to be that Iranians will flood into the streets and overthrow their oppressors.

When people think about revolutions they usually begin with certain mental models, and those models often misrepresent how dictatorial regimes actually collapse. Part of the problem is that we are still living in the afterglow of 1989. The end of the Cold War was a formative moment for many of today’s leaders.

As the historian Timothy Garton Ash argued in 2009, the events of 1989 appeared to inaugurate a “new model of revolution”: peaceful uprisings in which citizens reclaimed their states from authoritarian rule. The problem is that this model has since become the default way of imagining how dictatorships collapse — even in places where the underlying political dynamics are entirely different.

This was arguably part of what drove support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The neoconservatives who dominated the George W. Bush administration after 9/11 were shaped not by Vietnam but by the fall of communism. They were men of the 1980s, not the 1960s. The invasion of Iraq was supposed to trigger democratic change across the Middle East. Once the tyrant was gone, the region was expected to democratise spontaneously.

But the popular revolutions of 1989 are arguably the exception rather than the rule. In reality, most regime collapses come about through elite fragmentation rather than popular protest.