Sure, but people saying this should remember that his predecessor, the Ayatollah Khomeini, was once in an even weaker position, exiled in France and powerless to effect a revolution.

Jimmy Carter gave him an out when he should have had the CIA execute the old bastard in Paris. I was reminded of this while reading a review of a 2007 book about Iran by the late Michael Leeden. He’s now loathed by more than a few on the Right for “promoting war”, just as he was twenty years ago by the Left, but his take was always more subtle than that:

Ledeen, then writing  in the shadow of the invasion of Iraq, urged Western strategies not to put their entire trust  in force of arms, but in supporting the emerging and dissident elements of the Iranian people. If you appeal to their deepest aspirations, he argued, they will come. “The Iranian people need 3 things  … hope, information and some material support … the Iranians feel abandoned,” Ledeen wrote.

They were abandoned, by Obama, then by Biden, who both decided to suck up to the Iranians even more than Carter did, handing over billions of dollars to supposedly stall the nuclear program, while enabling the Mullahs to crush uprisings against them.

But the writer of that article, if not Leeden, also sees something else:

That the two flagship cities of the Anglo world, London and New York, will have radical Muslim mayors a quarter century after 9/11 is an impressive demonstration of the power of demographics and institutional capture. But most of all it suggests that a civilization that believes in nothing will fall to one that believes in something, whatever that might be.

Let’s hope President Trump has not similarly let the Mullahs off the hook.