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The 1979 Iranian Revolution was one of the most stinging U.S. setbacks of the Cold War era.

A longtime ally that the U.S. depended on as a pillar of regional security, the shah, gave way to a theocratic regime based on hostility to America.

The revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy and seized our diplomatic personnel in November 1979. If that wasn't enough of a national embarrassment, a dramatic rescue attempt by the U.S. military in April 1980 ended in abject failure at a staging area in Iran dubbed Desert One.

As the Islamic Republic totters on the precipice, struggling to put down country-wide protests that are more threatening than any it has ever faced, it is possible to imagine that we could be about to experience a bookend, from 1979 to 2026.

The first Iranian revolution came in the context of a U.S. brought low by its exit from Vietnam, of a hollow U.S. military, of the advance of our enemies around the world (from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the Sandinista takeover in Nicaragua), and of a feckless president in the person of Jimmy Carter whose administration was associated with U.S. retreat.

A second Iranian revolution, which is obviously not a guarantee, would underline the opposite dynamic on all counts.

It's not true that Jimmy Carter threw the shah overboard. The Iranian ruler's own incompetence and indecision did him in. He couldn't decide to suppress or placate the protest movement, and proved unable to do either.

By some estimates, it was -- as a share of the population -- the largest revolutionary movement in modern history. In echoes of the current situation in Iran, rampant inflation, regime self-dealing, middle-class disaffection, and ideological and regional priorities that didn't align with what most Iranians wanted fueled the revolt.

In a crucial dynamic that we haven't yet seen in contemporary Iran, the military began to melt away, and it wasn't clear if the shah had tried to shoot his way into staying in power, how many troops would have been ready to carry out their orders.

Once in charge, the mullahs undertook a low-level, ongoing war against the United States via terrorist proxies and spread its malign tentacles throughout the Middle East in a bid for regional dominance.

U.S. administrations tended to believe that it was too difficult to do much about this, and Barack Obama actively sought to accommodate Iranian power.

Now, though, the dynamic has changed. As Trump has said in a different context, the hunter has become the hunted.

After Oct. 7, the Israelis systematically neutered Iran's proxies, and Tehran lost a significant ally with the fall of Bashar al-Assad.

Whereas Iran humiliated us in 1979 with the embassy seizure, we humiliated Iran last year with the strikes on its nuclear sites that made the regime's painful, decades-long effort to get a nuke seem a costly misadventure.

The contrast in U.S. military proficiency, it is worth noting, between Operation Eagle Claw, the aborted Delta Force operation in 1980, and Operation Midnight Hammer couldn't be starker.

At the same time, the U.S. has a president very different from Jimmy Carter. No one will ever find Donald Trump wearing a sweater and talking to the nation about malaise. Trump's mode is pure assertion, based on an impulse toward personal and national dominance alien to Carter.

The Iranians may be able to cajole Trump into negotiations, but they will never be able to push him around, and they disregard his threats at their peril.

If the regime actually falls and is replaced by an allied or nonhostile government in Iran, it would move a large piece off the strategic chessboard for our enemies, and change the geopolitical balance of the Middle East. As much as the 1979 revolution was a debacle f the West, a favorable 2026 revolution would be a boon -- to the Iranians and to us and our allies.

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(Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry)

(c) 2026 by King Features Syndicate