The Iranian people have had enough. Absent the ability of even traditional religious conservatives to feed their families, even Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s ability to restore order with brute force may not be enough.
Just as the Arab Spring reverberated beyond Tunisia, the Islamic Republic’s fall could also spread to imperil other regimes. The Aliyev dynasty in Azerbaijan should be worried.
Dictatorships are bad at recognizing the reality around them. Autocrats surround themselves with sycophants and tolerate no dissent. They pay lobbyists, think tankers, and the occasional Texas congressman lavishly to repeat their talking points.
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In Azerbaijan’s case, this has led to the myth that Iranian Azeris represent “South Azerbaijan” and wish to separate from Iran. Such a narrative ignores both history and the fact that Khamenei himself is Azeri as are the most brutal units of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Still, Iranian Azerbaijan is important. Tabriz was the epicenter of Iran’s 1905-1909 Constitutional Revolution. That uprising against tyranny occurred against the backdrop of Iranian Azerbaijani newspapers and civil society. Today, civil society is much stronger in Iranian Azerbaijan; in Aliyev’s republic, its freedom of action hovers between that of North Korea and Eritrea. If the theocracy falls and Iranians of all ethnicities are allowed to organize and move on their desires, it is more likely that Iranian Azeris will agitate for change in Baku than that they would throw off the yoke of one dictator only to subordinate themselves to one as brutal.
Geopolitically, as well, the Islamic Republic’s fall could be a death knell for Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan’s whole brand is that it is an oasis of moderation and a staging ground for espionage and operations into Iran. If the Islamic Republic ends and an Iranian republic or constitutional monarchy emerges, both the United States and Israel will recalibrate their strategy to privilege Iran over its smaller neighbors. This would be a return to the twin pillars strategy that shaped US and British thinking into the 1970s when the United States leaned upon both the shah and the Saudi monarchy. From a strictly realist policy, Iran is a bigger catch than Azerbaijan. Both the United States and Israel will encourage investment in Iran to help the country rebuild. In effect, Azerbaijan will be cut loose and, with neither Israelis nor Americans feeling they need Azerbaijan anymore, they will be less inclined to censor what they think about the region’s most brutal dictatorship.
If Azerbaijan dares to sponsor separatist action in Iran, it is even conceivable that under a future administration, the US Department of State might even label it a State Sponsor of Terror, a designation it already deserves. Should sanctioned Iranian leaders and military officers seek to launder their cash through Baku as Russian President Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs do, then the chance of Azerbaijan remaining long off the Financial Action Task Force grey lists becomes miniscule.
While Armenians rightly have long memories and may neither forgive nor forget Israel’s cynicism and its arms sales to Baku in the run-up and during the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh, shifting geopolitical winds might lead Israel to cast its lot with Armenia, both as a fellow democracy and as a doorway into Iran. Whether in Julfa, Isfahan, or Vanak, cosmopolitan Armenian Iranians will become the gateway to investment and entry into the Iranian market and society.
What happens in Tehran will reverberate far and wide. Just like an earthquake off the coast of Sumatra launched a tsunami that devastated Thailand and Sri Lanka, the tsunami unleashed by the collapse of the Islamic Republic could destroy Aliyev’s ambitions, decades of caviar diplomacy, and the United States’, Europe’s, and Israel’s broader approach to the South Caucasus.
(Michael Rubin is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.)