Why the World Cannot Ask Iranians to Pay Alone
Babak Payami –
After forty-seven years of the Islamic Republic in Iran, much of the world has finally reached the conclusion that Iranians reached decades ago: this regime must not exist. Nearly five decades of absolute power, imposed with an iron fist over one of the world’s richest countries, have yielded terrorism abroad and repression, economic disaster, and environmental catastrophe at home.
What remains extraordinary is not only the brutality of the regime, but the restraint of the Iranian people. For nearly half a century, they have fought for the right to determine their own fate by overwhelmingly peaceful means. They have returned, again and again, to a principle rare in modern political struggle: resistance without surrendering the country to civil collapse.
It started within weeks. As the mask began to slip from the face of a charismatic mullah romanticized by Western intellectuals in quasi-saintly terms, Iranian women were already in the streets opposing forced hijab. Their warning was ignored. Since then, the pattern has held. The people resisted. The regime escalated. The world looked away.
That pattern is not a matter of interpretation anymore. The prison massacres of the late 1980s, the campaign of assassinations abroad, the use of hostage diplomacy, proxy warfare, ideological intimidation, and the systematic repression of every major uprising have established the record beyond serious dispute. The Islamic regime did not survive because its nature was misunderstood only in Tehran. It survived because too many outside powers chose transaction over principle.
This is the heart of the argument. Authoritarian powers had their own reasons to deal with the regime. Western democracies had the opposite obligation. Instead, from early strategic misjudgments to decades of appeasement, the Islamic Republic benefited from a world that preferred bargains, postponement, and illusion to moral clarity.
And that failure has a cost.
Subscriber-only essay:
The full piece traces how decades of appeasement, strategic blindness, and moral evasion helped prolong the life of the Islamic Republic, and why the cost of ending it cannot now be outsourced to Iranians alone. Read the full essay on Substack.
