Will Iran's wall fall, or will repression win out?
National Post, 18 January 2026
There were two attempted uprisings in 1989 — a successful one in Poland and a failed one in China. Which one will Iran end up like?
The eyes of the world are on Iran, wondering if 2026 might be the Persian equivalent of the Slavic 1989, when the nations of eastern Europe — first Poland and then its neighbours — threw off the Soviet empire and tore down the Berlin Wall.
Perhaps. But maybe it will be the Persian version of China 1989, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) massacred its own people in Tiananmen Square, renewing its repressive regime for another 36 years and counting. At the moment Tehran is looking more like Tiananmen.
Both the liberating 1989 and the lethal 1989 had their roots in 1979 — the year that gave us the world of the past four-plus decades.
In 1978, Deng Xiaoping consolidated his control of the CCP, and a cardinal from Kraków was elected Pope John Paul II. In 1979, Deng unleashed wide-ranging reforms, relaxing CCP political control and embracing far-reaching market-directed economic policies. He was no champion of personal liberty, establishing one of the greatest tyrannical measures in human history — the one-child policy, which for decades imposed state coercion upon the most intimate decisions of hundreds of millions of Chinese families.
In June 1979, John Paul returned to Poland and proclaimed the beginning of the end of the evil empire. Solidarity was founded in 1980, and by 1990 Solidarity’s president, Lech Walęsa, was president of Poland.
In 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s election as U.K. prime minister moved the West toward a more muscular defence of freedom. Her great ally, Ronald Reagan, would be elected the next year, and together they would push from without against the slavehouse that the Slavs were rising against from within.
And in 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to take power in Iran. The Islamic Revolution chased out the Shah, captured the American hostages, and changed Middle Eastern geopolitics until today.
The arc that began in 1979 settled in different places by 1989, one of the more consequential decades in history.
In Europe, the decade had a happy ending. Thatcher was still in power when John Paul’s moral revolution triumphed, and Reagan was less than a year out of office. Thatcher would follow him out in 1990, seen off by her own party. Their achievements were considerable, but the great Anglo-American partnership had reached its zenith.
Iran spent the 1980s at war with Iraq, a costly attempt by Saddam Hussein’s secularist Arab nationalism to limit, or even eliminate, the theocratic Islamism next door. After more than a million deaths, the war ended in a stalemate. Iraqi secularism did not replace Iran’s Islamic Revolution as the dominant regional power, though Saddam would make murderous mischief soon enough in Kuwait.
By 1989, Iran was secure and stable and began a 35-year campaign of spreading its Islamist influence throughout the region, including the export of terrorism. The mullahs had quasi-allies in the rise of what would become al-Qaida, which had its own roots in the jihadist siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979.
By June 1989 in China — the same month Solidarity swept the first free elections in Poland — the spirit of liberty began to breathe in Beijing. Deng’s relaxation of political controls and the emergence of genuine, if limited, economic liberty led Chinese youth to demand more. It was a heady time, and the question was how far Deng would allow things to go. Would he follow the lead of Mikhail Gorbachev who had, more rather than less, renounced the option of repression to maintain communist control?
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