If Iran falls, the United Nations will be first to feel the shockwaves

The grisly images of morgues overflowing with corpses smuggled out of Iran are so shocking, they have silenced the usual apologists for the Islamic Republic.

As Donald Trump mulls some sort of military action to punish Iran’s hardliners for their crackdown, and Nato allies join in the condemnation of the ayatollahs’ brutal regime, it is easy to think that Tehran is isolated.

Sadly, official Western denunciations of repression in Iran are not shared worldwide.

The “usual suspects” – Russia and China – would reap geopolitical benefits from Iran continuing to be a pariah state. Tehran has to sell its oil at a discount to China, and provides up to a quarter of its needs, more important than ever after the Venezuelan crisis. For Putin, a repressive Iran also keeps an energy-rich authoritarian state like Kazakhstan hemmed in and without access to world markets.

It is a paradox that the dramatic weakening of the Islamic Republic’s international position – as its proxies, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, were devastated by Israel, and Assad’s allied regime in Syria collapsed – has removed the incentive for Arab monarchies to back US action against the mullahs now.

Trump’s decisive intervention in the 12-day war last June removed Saudi and Emirati fears of Iranian sponsorship of Shiite insurrection on their side of the Persian Gulf. What the Arab monarchs there fear is that a democratised Iran could be much more subversive of their authoritarian regimes than a discredited ayatollah-run Iran would be.

Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan is vocal in his sympathy for Palestinian self-government, but relentlessly hostile to Kurdish aspirations in northern Syria, which his forces have helped the new regime in Damascus to crush. Iran’s large Kurdish minority has been very active in the demonstrations there, but Ankara fears that if change in Tehran meant autonomy, it would ignite the even bigger Kurdish minority in Turkey to demand concessions.

Turkey’s ally Pakistan fears that successful discontent in Iran could reinforce cross-border discontent among the Balochi minority.

A break-up of Iran is a risk – and, while none of these states are going to intervene directly on the regime’s side, they’re using their influence to protect it.

This partly explains the strange silence of the United Nations on the crisis in Iran. As Trump pulls out of UN sub-organisations en bloc, it’s a dirty little secret that its secretary general, Antonio Guterres, needs not just authoritarian states like Iran and its allies, but also the Arab monarchs, in order to keep the UN afloat – even if it’s at the expense of its “humanitarian” ethos.

Iran may yet prove willing to do a deal with Trump to forestall airstrikes on the regime’s key centres of power. The Venezuelan model – after swift decapitation, being allowed to continue with American oversight – has many attractions for Tehran. Minus Nicolas Maduro, the regime in Caracas has survived. It is the American Pope, not the US president, who has received the leader of the opposition there, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado.

The tragedy of Iranians could be that US pressure will cause the Islamic regime to abandon its nuclear ambitions and terrorist proxies as the price of solidifying its control at home. From Trump via the Arab monarchies to China and Russia, there are too many who would prefer the survival of a dictatorial but cynical regime to the “risks” of a different Iran. And the UN bureaucrats would be able to carry on cooperating with its appointees across its myriad committees and working groups.

Of course, there are dangers that an insurrectionary revolution will go sour rather than liberating Iranians. But stabilising the mullahs’ rule could well give their own “revolutionary” aspirations a new lease of life after a “decent interval”.

It is wise to avoid Bush-Blair-style regime change, but quite foolish to cut a deal to legitimise the ayatollahs’ regime and dash Iranians’ hopes. Their resentment could come back to bite us in the future.

Mark Almond is the director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford