The death of Bela Kiraly earlier this week got me thinking about revolutionary contagion -- i.e., the spread of revolutionary movements across borders -- in the context of the recent turbulence in Iran. Kiraly was the Hungarian military officer who commanded the rebel forces in the 1956 uprising, a rebellion crushed by the Soviet army. He escaped into exile, but made a triumphant return to Hungary after communism fell.

Together with Nikita Khruschchev's "secret speech" denouncing Stalinism, the Hungarian Revolution dealt a major blow to communism's ideological appeal. For several decades after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, communism seemed to be an attractive alternative to liberal capitalism and plenty of smart but gullible people succumbed to its allure. Western leaders worried that Bolshevism would spread rapidly in the 1920s and again after World War II, and an exaggerated (indeed, paranoid) fear of communist subversion was the essence of 1950s McCarthyism. But the exposure of Stalin's tyranny and the brutal suppression of revolts in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968) revealed Soviet communism for what it was: a brutal dictatorship that depended on the jackboot of the Red Army to survive or spread.  

Marxism-Leninism did take root elsewhere, of course (most notably in China and Cuba), but China quickly broke free of the Soviet orbit and Moscow's other revolutionary clients tended to be weak, fractious, and dependent on Soviet subsidies. The United States enjoyed strong alliances with Western Europe and Japan (the other major centers of industrial power), while the USSR had to prop up its Eastern European satellites and recruit a lot of minor powers like Ethiopia, South Yemen, or North Korea. As a result, America's global alliance network dwarfed the Soviet system on most measures of latent and manifest power. With the benefit of hindsight, communism's eroding appeal was good news for the United States and its allies.

Now consider Iran. Back in 1979-1980, the Islamic Republic seemed to be the vanguard of an emerging wave of Islamic fundamentalism, and the novel combination of democratic structures (including more-or-less free elections) with religious oversight (via Ayatollah Khomeini’s concept of velayet-e faqih, or "guardianship of the jurisprudent") seemed like it might be an attractive model for other predominantly Muslim societies. Because Khomeini sometimes portrayed Iran's experience as a model for others and spoke of the necessity of overthrowing "all treacherous, corrupt, oppressive, and criminal regimes," Iran's neighbors worried that the its revolution might prove contagious. Yet revolutionary Iran has been unable to export its principles elsewhere, and its influence over groups like Hezbollah depends more on material support than on ideological fidelity.

Here's the good news from Tehran. In the aftermath of a stolen election and a harsh government crackdown, the Islamic Republic is an even less attractive model for the many Arabs and/or Muslims who currently seek greater tolerance, openness, and engagement with the outside world. Ahmadinejad, Khamenei, and the Revolutionary Guards are clearly no more tolerant than the ruling elites in places like Syria, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, and they have no new model of governance to offer others. Ironically, Iran's ideological appeal would have been enhanced had Ahmaninejad & Co. run a fair election and permitted the Iranian people to express their preferences without coercive interference, but they didn't do that.

The one remaining tool in Iran's ideological arsenal is anti-Americanism, which still plays well in the region. The United States can defuse that weapon too, if we continue to adjust our policies in ways that are more consonant with our overall interests. Obama's Cairo speech and his more principled position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are steps in the right direction, as is pragmatic engagement with Syria and a gradual shift back to an "offshore balancing" strategy in the Gulf. None of these steps will solve all our problems in the Middle East, of course, but they will make it harder forTehran to score points by criticizing the United States and its allies.

The ability of Iran's current rulers to suppress the current challenge to their rule is both disheartening and unsurprising, but there is a silver lining. By forcing them to reveal their true colors, recent events have further diminished whatever regional appeal the Islamic Republic might once have possessed. If Obama's diplomatic outreach to Iran does not succeed and we are forced to rely on some combination of containment and deterrence, Iran's tarnished image will make that task much easier.

ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images

The New York Times has an important piece today on why Iran's clerical regime is unlikely to fall in the face of the current wave of protests. The short version is that Iran's rulers have several overlapping security organizations that they can call upon: the police, some three million members of paramilitary Basij, the 120,000-strong Revolutionary Guards, and an army of some 400,000. All report to Ayatollah Khameini and as far as one can tell from news reports, none of them show significant signs of disintegrating.

This story points to a serious lacuna in our understanding of what is happening in Iran. Despite the government’s efforts to exclude correspondents and shut down other channels of information (e.g., the Internet), we've been getting lots of reports and videos from the reformist forces.  But I haven't seen any interviews or tweets from Basij members or Revolutionary Guards, or from the millions of Iranians who did in fact vote for Ahmadinejad. In short, we have no good way of knowing how firm the government’s position really is.

The literature on revolutionary upheavals teaches that governments do not fall so long as the leadership remains resolute and the security forces and the army remain loyal. If the Basij, Revolutionary Guards, and other security elements remain willing to follow orders -- and that seems to be the case so far -- then Iran's current leaders will remain in charge.  

The only prospect for genuine revolution that I can see would be a prolonged and growing wave of popular discontent -- general strikes, funeral demonstrations that get bigger over time (as they did in 1979), etc., -- that begins to make normal life impossible, does further damage to Iran’s already-troubled economy and eventually leads to a major rift among the current rulers and to a major reshuffling of the leadership. But it is hard for me to imagine Khameini or Ahmadinejad boarding a plane into exile the way the Shah did in 1979.

Yet even if the current regime survives the present challenge, the impact of the crisis is likely to be salutary. Iran's appeal as a model of Islamic governance has been tarnished by this episode: instead of being the principled defenders of the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary vision of the "rule of the jurisprudent," his successors now look more like garden-variety authoritarians trying to hang onto privilege and power in the face of widespread popular discontent. And that means Muslims elsewhere will be less inclined to see Tehran as an inspiration, even if they are unhappy with political conditions in their own countries.

The current crisis may also put to rest a lot of the bellicose talk about military action. In recent years, advocates of "kinetic action" (read: preventive war) against Iran have sought to portray it as a nation of wild-eyed revolutionary fanatics, led by Holocaust-denying zealots who openly crave martyrdom and would therefore be willing to fire nuclear weapons at other countries even if it led to their own destruction. That alarmist image was always pretty ludicrous, and it looks increasingly inappropriate today. In the wake of this stolen election (and see here for more evidence of electoral chicanery), Iran's rulers looks less like a group of fanatics and more like a group of grumpy old men. I don't see Osama bin Laden or Che or Qutb or even Khomeini; I see Brezhnev, Andropov, Mussolini, or Ceaucescu. It is also clear that a sizeable segment of Iran’s population -- and especially its younger members -- isn't interested in a confrontation with the West and simply wants many of the freedoms that we claim to cherish. They are also patriots who love their country, however, and the surest way to turn them against us and to reinforce Ahmadinejad et al would be to start dropping a lot of smart bombs on them.  

In fact, we actually do know precisely how to deal with this sort of situation. As we learned during the Cold War, the proper response to thuggish authoritarian regimes is containment via deterrence, combined with hardnosed diplomacy on specific security issues and a sustained effort to win over their societies by showing them that we know how to produce a better way of life. That strategy won the Cold War without the manifold dangers of preventive war, and probably saved millions of lives in the process. The clerics and their front man may hang on for now, and they might even get a few (unusable) nuclear weapons one day. But time is on our side, and we can afford to be patient.

OLIVIER LABAN-MATTEI/AFP/Getty Images

Andrew Sullivan replies to my query yesterday as to how far he is willing to take his recommendation that Western governments not recognize Ahmadinejad as Iran's president:

My point was about not recognizing now. As to the future, we have to see what it brings. A day is a long time right now in Iranian politics. So let's take this one day at a time for now."

Fine by me. And his blog has been a fascinating read since the election, not least for his spirited debunking of a lot of foolish neoconservative posturing on these events.