The difference between the illusion of power and its reality is the difference between Ayatollah Khamenei and President Donald Trump. Trump is about to join the very small number of American presidents who are reordering the world. Khamenei stands on the brink of the abyss of history, reserved for murderous fanatics. If Trump lifts Khamenei over that edge, the president’s place in history will be secure. He will have restored freedom to the great Persian people.
Belief in the unlimited power of a totalitarian government to maintain itself and protect its rulers is a dangerous conceit, as both Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro have discovered. Ayatollah Khamenei may be discovering the same harsh reality: no government, no matter how ruthless, can hold out for centuries or even decades against a resentful population.
Even the rulers of Rome at the height of the Caesars or the Severan dynasty were not assured of an endless power struggle. The Soviet Union, which possessed both nuclear weapons and a ubiquitous security force, survived only from 1922 to 1991.
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The Assad family took power in 1971 when Hafez Al-Assad consolidated control in Syria and retained it until December 2024, when his son and other relatives were forced to flee to Russia.
“Papa Doc” Duvalier took power in Haiti in 1957 and held it until his death in 1971. He was succeeded by his son Jean-Claude Duvalier, nicknamed “Baby Doc”, who was forced to flee in February 1986.
Hugo Chavez first tried to gain power through a coup in Venezuela in 1992, but that failed and then won power in 1999, which he never relinquished until his death, when Nicholas Maduro took over the police state until this month, when the US military assisted US law enforcement on President Trump’s orders to take Maduro to a prison cell in New York.
The American government endures because it rests on the consent of the governed. Any political entity that fails to do so enjoys uneasy control at best, punctuated by attempted uprisings by a people longing for freedom and prosperity.
We are watching in real time the Iranian people’s third attempt to throw off the shackles of the ‘Islamic Republic of Iran’, imposed on them in 1979 by the fanatic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who has oppressed the Iranian people for decades. Khomeini ousted the Shah of Iran in 1979 and now the Shah’s son could return as constitutional monarch to replace Khomeini’s hand-picked successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This ayatollah is as ruthless as the first and hundreds are mowed down by his thugs in a desperate attempt to maintain control of their kleptocracy, but the people of Iran have seen their savings wiped out, their drinking water contaminated and their electricity cut off repeatedly. The country is in trouble and, humiliated by Israeli and American air and missile forces last summer, the nation has entered its third week of mass protests. If the US or the Jewish state make the final push, the great people of Persia – 500 years older than Christianity – will reemerge and regain their place among the great civilizations of the earth.
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Just as the mullahs and their Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shock troops shudder and fire wildly into crowds of hundreds of thousands, so too does the dictatorship of Cuba’s Miguel Díaz-Canel, Fidel’s successor, and then Raul Castro look shaky. Like Venezuela, and Syria, and the Soviets before them, the Cuban regime depends on the illusion of permanence. But their people cannot eat illusions or drink fantasies.
Three times before, Iran’s tyrants have faced serious challenges to their power, but each time – in the late 1990s, during the 2009 Green Movement and in 2022 with the Iranian women’s movement, commonly known as the “Woman, Life, Freedom” – the power of the ayatollahs was challenged, but those challenges were not backed up with even words of encouragement from the American presidents of the time. Ayatollah Khomeini took power when Jimmy Carter was in power, and Khamenei retained power during the aborted revolutions that took place under Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
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In this current turmoil of Iran, President Donald Trump has been an outspoken supporter of the Iranian people seeking freedom. Just as he did with Maduro, President Trump has given Khamenei many warnings. Just as Maduro ignored them, Khamenei also responded with mocking comments about the President of the United States. The ayatollah also cut off his country’s internet and mobile services and ordered his thugs to open fire.
Will it work again? Nobody knows. All we know is that an oppressed people cannot be oppressed forever. And that the presidents who help free them deserve the applause and respect of history.
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