THE LONG VIEW

There is a moment, just before empires fall, when their leaders stop believing in their own myths. For the Shah of Iran in 1978, it was the realization that the army would not fire on students. For the Soviet Politburo in 1989, it was the refusal to send tanks into Prague—again. And for Iran’s clerics today, it may be the sight of young women burning their hijabs not in secret, but on live streams, defiantly claiming a Persian identity older than Islam itself. The theocratic state, by demanding total loyalty to a divine-political order, makes compromise impossible. It cannot evolve, only collapse. What’s unfolding in Tehran is not merely a political crisis, but a civilizational reckoning: a 2,500-year-old empire forced to choose between its religious present and its imperial past. History shows that when a people remember who they were before the ideology, the ideology begins to crack. —Sir Edward Pemberton