All totalitarian regimes have the opportunity to place their own and other society’s citizens at risk…
Is coronavirus Iran’s Chernobyl? – opinion
While Gorbachev himself highlighted that Chernobyl was the straw that broke the camel’s back, the road toward implosion was paved long in advance.
Walking alongside the graveyard of ambitious and expansionist empires, it is frequently overlooked that collapse often results from internal implosions and mismanagement, rather than from outside threats. The critical threshold of implosion begins when an authority spends more attention and resources on its external ambitions than its internal responsibilities.
Our most modern example of this is the fall of the Soviet Union. Marred by internal social unrest that perestroika reforms were unable to amend, immense military expenditure of 15 billion rubles in Afghanistan, and the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, the 1980’s defined the decade in which the USSR passed the critical threshold. Former USSR secretary-general Mikhail Gorbachev noted that along with internal challenges, most notably the Chernobyl meltdown “was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
While Gorbachev himself highlighted that Chernobyl was the straw that broke the camel’s back, the road toward implosion was paved long in advance.
If those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, then Tehran is in for a rude awakening. As the coronavirus pandemic continues, Iran has the eighth-highest number of reported cases of the virus and the eighth-highest most deaths. The internal socio-economic unrest, large military expenditures abroad, and poor crisis management that prioritized public image over competency reflects many parallels between the Chernobyl meltdown and the COVID-19 pandemic in Iran.
Just as the seeds to Soviet collapse were sown before the mismanagement in Chernobyl, the internal discontent in Iran was sown before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Limping into the decade, the nationwide protests in late 2019 reflected Iranian authorities’ internal challenges.
