The New York Times’s Roger Cohen is still obsessing over the fact that the nice Iran he puffed up in a series of controversial and utterly misleading columns last winter was exposed as a lie in July when a ruthless regime stole an election and then brutally repressed those who dared to challenge it. In his latest online column, Cohen ponders why some nasty regimes fall while others survive. It’s a fascinating question but one that Cohen clearly does not understand.

Cohen recalls the way the Communist government of East Germany collapsed when a border guard in Berlin opened the gate to the West. That was a moment in which a tangible crack in the Iron Curtain became a symbolic step that sent the infamous wall and then the entire Soviet evil empire crashing down in ruins. In contrast to that glorious victory for freedom, Chinese Red Army troops obeyed orders to mow down the Tiananmen Square freedom protesters in Beijing that same year. To the dismay of Cohen and the rest of the world, the same thing happened in Tehran this past July when government forces refused to break ranks with their Islamist masters and the leaders of the protest movement lacked the will to directly confront it as anti-Communist dissidents, such as the Czech playwright and future president Vaclav Havel, did in 1989.

Cohen doesn’t know why these different outcomes happened and seems to put it down to an unkind fate he is sure will someday be reversed, at least in Iran if not China. I share that hope, but it’s not very difficult to understand why tyrants fall in some countries and survive in others.

The most important reason is that history teaches us that repressive regimes only collapse when they embrace measures that loosen their hold on the reins of power, not when they are their most brutal. The Soviet Union collapsed not when it was at its most insanely totalitarian under Stalin or Brezhnev but when it was led by a man who hoped he could put a human face on the inhuman ideology of Communism. So long as China’s leadership as well as the Islamist mullahs of Tehran have no scruples about using force to hold on to power, it isn’t likely they will be ousted.

But part of the process by which these regimes lose their will to fight for their own preservation is accomplished via moral pressure. When the cause of freedom in such places is treated as a priority for the West, it can, when combined with the inevitable economic difficulties that such regimes find themselves in, create a loss of confidence in the regime. The willingness of the West to speak up in support of Soviet dissidents as well as protest movements in its satellite states, such as Poland’s Solidarity, helped isolate these regimes and deprive them of legitimacy. But when protesters are ignored by the West (as has been the fate of Chinese dissidents) or let down by the United States (as was the case with President Obama’s soft-pedaling the outrages in Tehran this year), those movements can be dismissed as irrelevant. Would East German guard Harald Jaeger, whom Cohen celebrates, have acted as he did in 1989 had not the protesters been emboldened and his Communist masters weakened by the willingness of the West to speak up against Communism?

Those who serve such regimes will only abandon them when they feel that tyranny is going under, a state of mind that cannot be encouraged when the president of the United States runs to engage and appease their leaders. Those in the West who bolster the legitimacy of despotic regimes via diplomacy should not be surprised when they observe that people who live in these countries and especially those who guard the tyrants conclude from such behavior that the time is not right to take a stand for freedom.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 4:47 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.