Totalitarian regimes tend to collapse the same way Mike Campbell went bankrupt in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: “Gradually and then suddenly.”
In hindsight, it’s always easy to connect the dots. (Smug college professors do it for a living.) Because after the die is cast, you don’t need to be a genius to deduce that A, B, and C led to D(emise).
In fact, you don’t even have to be right, since your theories aren’t falsifiable. They’re ideological fan fiction written in reverse, because it’s impossible to prove if A, B, and C were causation, correlation, or coincidental. All we know for sure is that they happened.
Thus, there’s no predictive value.
I’ll prove it to you: Historians today have thousands of explanations for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even the History Channel — when it’s not covering more important stuff, such as ancient aliens meeting George Washington — has gotten in on the fun.
But almost nobody predicted the USSR’s collapse until it actually happened.
There’s no mathematical formula for predicting when a regime will end. Anyone who claims otherwise is lying to you.
Sometimes it’s because of one big event. Other times, it’s thousands of little events. Sometimes the people rebel and overthrow their leaders. Other times, the leaders crush the rebellion and preserve the regime.
So I’m not going to tell you what’s gonna happen next in Iran. It’s unknowable.
And that’s the foreign policy challenge of all U.S. presidents: They don’t have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight or the gift of prophecy. Instead, they’ve gotta play the cards they’ve been dealt, estimate the odds… and hope for the best.
Because it’s all guesswork in fancy suits.
Which is why the smartest foreign policy is to “grease the wheels” (i.e. improve the probability) of whichever outcome is in America’s national interest.
All wars have teachable moments. Unfortunately, lots of the teachable moments are contradictory: One of the lessons of World War II was the folly of appeasement. One of the lessons from the Iraq War was the folly of preemptive intervention.
Part of the reason why we entered the Iraq War was BECAUSE of the lesson of World War II.
But neither historical lesson was a moral absolute. Like all other lessons, they’re only true some of the time.
The neocons lost the country because the Iraq War wasn’t worth the cost. Sure, it’s great that Saddam Hussein is now worm food, but squandering so much wealth, blood, and national treasure — and leaving Iran as a regional superpower — did very little to improve the lives of the American people.
The juice didn’t justify the squeeze.
Of course, a big part of the neocons’ sales pitch was that the Iraq War would fundamentally transform the Middle East. As they described it, the benefits weren’t limited to the deposal of Saddam and the destruction of his WMD stockpiles (ahem), but that a free, prosperous, democratic Iraq would serve as a beachhead against Islamic extremism.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks directly led to the Iraq War — not because Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were bosom buddies, but because one of the “lessons” we learned from Sept. 11 was that we needed be more vigilant in connecting the dots. History has (justifiably) judged the neocons harshly, but their motive was laudable: They wanted to keep Americans safe.
Immediately after 9/11, it became a foreign policy priority to neutralize Islamic terrorist threats before thousands more Americans died. A key benefit of the Iraq War, we were told, was that a free, egalitarian, pro-Western democracy in the heart of the Middle East would pressure neighboring Islamic regimes to democratize, embrace Western values, and “drain the swamp” of regional extremism.
Had this actually happened, history would’ve recorded the Iraq War very differently.
And the historic “lessons” we’ve learned would be far different, too.
Even though it really, truly came close to happening! Seriously!
Anyone remember the Arab Spring?
Anti-government protests, uprisings, and armed rebellion erupted in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain. Large demonstrations rocked the streets of Morocco, Iraq, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, and Sudan. There were even protests in the Palestinian territories, Saudia Arabia, and Western Sahara.
Their battle cry was “Ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-niẓām!” — meaning, “The people want to topple the regime!”
Then-President Barack Obama, very famously, opted to “lead from behind,” which meant sitting on his hands and shrugging his shoulders. This led to the most-organized Arab groups — the hardcore Islamic extremists — taking advantage of the chaos, with the Muslim Brotherhood capturing control of Cairo, and the rise of the ISIS caliphate after the death of Gaddafi.
None of which made Americans any safer.
And instead of isolating Iran, President Obama wooed the mullahs with flowery letters, a peace promise, a legal pathway to nuclear weapons, and airlifted billions of unmarked and untrackable U.S. dollars into Tehran.
Basically, he “greased the wheels” to empower the mullahs’ survival.
It might not rank with George Washington’s (alleged) meeting with space aliens, but one of history’s greatest mysteries is how a hawk such as John McCain would’ve responded to the Arab Spring. Because, had the 2008 presidential election gone differently, it would’ve been his responsibility.
I suspect McCain wouldn’t have chosen to “lead from behind.”
Which means, it’s entirely possible McCain would’ve gotten more Americans killed in yet another “forever war” in the Middle East. Sadly, we can’t dismiss the possibility.
But it’s also possible he would’ve been judicial and surgical, encouraging pro-Western protests wherever he could, transforming the Middle East into a safer, saner, freer place.
Today, Iran is facing an Arab Spring of its own — largely because President Trump “greased the wheels” for the mullahs’ demise: He crushed their economy with sanctions. He devalued their currency. He killed their top general. He allowed Israel to annihilate all their terrorist proxies. He buried their nuclear weapons program beneath a mountain of rubble — proving to the Iranian people how weak and isolated their leaders actually are.
And now there’s a very real possibility that the Iranian regime will FINALLY collapse.
There are no guarantees in foreign policy. All we can do is play the odds and hope for the best. But right now, the Trump presidency is standing at the precipice of the most consequential collection of foreign policy achievements in post-World War II history: The Abraham Accords. Peace deals in the Middle East. Regime change in Venezuela. The elimination of the Iranian nuclear threat.
And, very possibly, regime change in Iran.
In the process, President Trump is on the verge of correcting President Obama’s most egregious foreign policy disaster — and playing the ultimate “Reverse Uno Card.” All it took was a willingness to lead, the boldness to act, and the wisdom to know what’s in America’s national interest.
And there’s a lesson to be learned from that, too.
One Last Thing: 2026 is a critical year for America First: It began with Mayor Zohran Mamdani declaring war on “rugged individualism” and will reach a crescendo with the midterm elections. Nothing less than the fate of the America First movement teeters in the balance.
Never before have the political battlelines been so clearly defined. Win or lose, 2026 will transform our country.
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