By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, January 13, 2026
The 1979 Iranian Revolution was one of the most stinging
U.S. setbacks of the Cold War era.
A longtime ally that the U.S. depended on as a pillar of
regional security, the shah, gave way to a theocratic regime based on hostility
to America.
The revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy and seized
our diplomatic personnel in November 1979. If that wasn’t enough of a national
embarrassment, a dramatic rescue attempt by the U.S. military in April 1980
ended in abject failure at a staging area in Iran dubbed Desert One.
As the Islamic Republic totters on the precipice,
struggling to put down countrywide protests that are more threatening than any
it has ever faced, it is possible to imagine that we could be about to
experience a bookend, from 1979 to 2026.
The first Iranian revolution came in the context of a
U.S. brought low by its exit from Vietnam, of a hollow U.S. military, of the
advance of our enemies around the world (from the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan to the Sandinista takeover in Nicaragua), and of a feckless
president in the person of Jimmy Carter whose administration was associated
with U.S. retreat.
A second Iranian revolution, which is obviously not a
guarantee, would underline the opposite dynamic on all counts.
It’s not true that Jimmy Carter threw the shah overboard.
The Iranian ruler’s own incompetence and indecision did him in. He couldn’t
decide to suppress or placate the protest movement, and proved unable to do
either.
By some estimates, it was — as a share of the population
— the largest revolutionary movement in modern history. In echoes of the
current situation in Iran, rampant inflation, regime self-dealing, middle-class
disaffection, and ideological and regional priorities that didn’t align with
what most Iranians wanted fueled the revolt.
In a crucial dynamic that we haven’t yet seen in
contemporary Iran, the military began to melt away, and it wasn’t clear, if the
shah had tried to shoot his way into staying in power, how many troops would
have been ready to carry out their orders.
Once in charge, the mullahs undertook a low-level,
ongoing war against the United States via terrorist proxies and spread their
malign tentacles throughout the Middle East in a bid for regional dominance.
U.S. administrations tended to believe that it was too
difficult to do much about this, and Barack Obama actively sought to
accommodate Iranian power.
Now, though, the dynamic has changed. As Trump has said
in a different context, the hunter has become the hunted.
After October 7, the Israelis systematically neutered
Iran’s proxies, and Tehran lost a significant ally with the fall of Bashar
al-Assad.
Whereas Iran humiliated us in 1979 with the embassy
seizure, we humiliated Iran last year with the strikes on its nuclear sites
that made the regime’s painful, decades-long effort to get a nuke seem a costly
misadventure.
The contrast in U.S. military proficiency, it is worth
noting, between Operation Eagle Claw, the aborted Delta Force operation in
1980, and Operation Midnight Hammer couldn’t be starker.
At the same time, the U.S. has a president very different
from Jimmy Carter. No one will ever find Donald Trump wearing a sweater and
talking to the nation about malaise. Trump’s mode is pure assertion, based on
an impulse toward personal and national dominance alien to Carter.
The Iranians may be able to cajole Trump into
negotiations, but they will never be able to push him around, and they
disregard his threats at their peril.
If the regime actually falls and is replaced by an allied or non-hostile government in Iran, it would move a large piece off the strategic chessboard for our enemies, and change the geopolitical balance of the Middle East. As much as the 1979 revolution was a debacle to the West, a favorable 2026 revolution would be a boon — to the Iranians and to us and our allies.
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