The United States faces a moment of moral and strategic reckoning in Iran. As the Islamic Republic unleashes unprecedented violence against its own people, President Donald Trump must decide whether America will finally stand with the Iranian people or repeat the fatal mistake of 1979, when Washington chose accommodation over responsibility and helped deliver a nation into the hands of theocrats. History is offering the United States a second chance. Whether it will take it remains uncertain.

In 1979, the Carter administration persuaded itself that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini could be managed, that political Islam could be moderated and that a revolutionary cleric might serve as a stabilizing figure during Iran’s transition from monarchy. The result was not stability but the Islamic Republic, a theocracy built on repression, state terror and permanent hostility to the West.

The Islamic Republic was not inevitable. It emerged from Western misjudgment, when diplomatic optimism displaced strategic realism and a nation was effectively surrendered to clerical revolutionaries in pursuit of illusory order. As protests mounted and the Shah’s authority collapsed, President Jimmy Carter’s advisers concluded the monarchy could not survive. They cast Khomeini as a transitional religious symbol who would calm the streets while moderates governed.

Washington acted on this........

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