Why Iran and other regimes are so hard to break

Since the start of the Iran conflict, President Trump warned that the regime’s days were numbered, culminating in this week’s threat to obliterate Iran’s “whole civilization.”

But for more than a month, the Iranian regime held out under relentless bombardment by the strongest military power in the world before reaching a cease-fire with the U.S. that could ultimately see Iran maintaining influence over one of the world’s most important sea lanes.

Iran’s ability to resist despite large civilian casualties, the decapitation of much of the regime’s leadership and severe economic damage shows the staying power of authoritarian governments. For decades, Tehran developed a toolbox that includes widespread political repression, relentless propaganda, an ideology of martyrdom and a powerful security apparatus—all aimed at protecting the state from enemies abroad and within.

“The state’s first priority was to ensure the survival of the regime,” said Nikolay Kozhanov, an expert on Iran at Qatar University. “There are reasons why the government, elite, and to some extent the people, end up uniting around the regime.

The leadership in Iran—as well as in countries such as North Korea, Russia and Cuba—shares an ability to endure casualties and economic hardship, pain that is often borne by their populations. And when their people do rise up in protest, the regime’s foot soldiers have proven ready to use lethal violence to put down dissent.

“There is a much higher tolerance for pain among authoritarian regimes,” said Edward Howell, an international-relations lecturer at the University of Oxford. “That’s because we see very little evidence of them prioritizing the needs of their people.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has used a mix of anti-Western rhetoric, targeted economic enticements and repression to resist intense international pressure and painful sanctions inflicted on his country following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Those tactics have helped Putin survive despite a ruinous war that has hobbled the Russian economy and killed or injured hundreds of thousands of its citizens.

North Korea’s Kim dynasty has survived for decades even as it has subjected its people to mass starvation, human-rights abuses and a draconian crackdown on information, all in the name of opposing a hostile U.S. Iran has violently quashed protests, jailed dissenters and put forth a narrative of a country under siege from Israel and the U.S.

The result is an axis of countries that are bent on defying what they describe as the threat from a U.S.-led order. Indeed, if Iran’s leadership survives the war—and tightens its grip on power at home—it will likely emerge even more determined to challenge the U.S.

After Trump made his threat this week to strike civilian infrastructure, Iranians gathered together at several power plants and bridges—the very targets that Trump threatened to destroy, according to Iranian news-agency videos verified by Storyful, which is owned by News Corp, parent company of The Wall Street Journal.

Evolving tactics

To be sure, such authoritarian regimes have vulnerabilities. The lack of checks and balances, a free press and any real outlet for public dissent can blind hard-line leaders to splits among the elites or a mounting groundswell of opposition that can snowball into a threat to their power.

Indeed, the Arab Spring of the early 2010s showed that protesters could organize more quickly and effectively against traditional security services. Uprisings rocked and, in some cases, uprooted strongman rulers in places such as Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. More than a decade after the protests, Syria’s Assad regime was ousted.

In response, Russia, Iran and North Korea have all sharpened their tools of oppression, becoming more adept at cutting their populations off from the internet, squelching political dissent and harshly punishing political enemies.

Russia cracked down quickly on protesters who used the internet to organize demonstrations against Putin throughout the 2010s. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Putin has tightened his grip even more.

The Kremlin has criminalized any opposition to the conflict, even jailing people for offenses such as putting antiwar slogans on supermarket price tags. It banned social-media platforms such as WhatsApp, YouTube and Facebook. It outlawed an organization of mothers and wives of missing soldiers who pressed to learn the fate of their loved ones and who criticized the Kremlin over the war.

Meanwhile, Russian propaganda has sought to rally Russians behind the conflict by likening the war to the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany. Russian schools now drill school children in military exercises and have started instituting classroom lessons on patriotism.

“The message is that Russia always wins,” said sociologist Elena Koneva, founder and sociologist at ExtremeScan Research Collective.

In Belarus, following a 2020 uprising triggered by allegations of vote stealing in a presidential election, leader Alexander Lukashenko threw more than a thousand people in jail.

North Korea, which has largely cut off unfettered internet access to most of its population, has cracked down on smuggled foreign content such as South Korean pop music, with owning or distributing it even punishable by death. The North Korean propaganda machine regularly excoriates the U.S. and South Korea while extolling the Kim family, likening them to gods.

At the same time, the regime crushes minimal signs of dissent. For example, North Korea has established five-household surveillance-system groups, demanding they hold routine criticism sessions to monitor dissent. Undercover regime spies exist in virtually every workplace.

New friends

Such leaders project an image of widespread popular support by staging elections and controlling the media, while also crushing any opposition, said Daniel Treisman, a political-science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has researched dictatorships.

“For individuals to protest, they have to believe there will be many others with them, providing safety in numbers,” Treisman said. “Authoritarian governments work hard to prevent that belief from taking root.”

Over the winter, Iran crushed rallies calling for regime change. According to some estimates, tens of thousands were killed, according to rights groups and activists.

After they are suppressed, protests in Iran are usually followed by waves of mass arrests, with lengthy prison sentences imposed on national-security grounds or allegations that protesters are foreign agents. The clerical leadership seeks to obtain some public legitimacy through elections that grant Iranians some level of democratic participation, but it only offers candidates vetted by the system.

These regimes are increasingly coordinating with one another. Lukashenko, in a recent visit to Pyongyang, agreed with Kim to sign a “friendship treaty” between Belarus and North Korea. Lukashenko said the two countries needed cooperation for “protecting their sovereignty and improving the well-being of our citizens”—a veiled reference to their shared resistance to pressure from the U.S. and its allies.

During this winter’s popular protests, Iran employed Russian technology to make its internet blackouts more effective without affecting government services, while also disrupting the Starlink satellites that provided critical communications for protesters on the ground, according to regional analysts. The Kremlin also sent armored vehicles and small arms to help Iranian police suppress demonstrations, they say.

Iran and Russia agreed last year to cooperate on law enforcement, including Russian training of Iranian police forces, said Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iranian-Russian relations at Sciences Po, a research university in Paris.

Kim Jong Un’s decision to send roughly 15,000 North Korean troops to Russia’s Kursk region shows the dictator’s sleight of hand. State propaganda has reframed the deployment—which left thousands dead—as proof that North Korea, like Russia, is under threat of a hegemonic U.S.-led order.

In exchange for the soldiers, Russia provided the Kim regime with economic, political and military support. Both countries kept the deployments secret from their populations for months. When Kim finally spoke publicly of the move, he apologized for failing to bring them safely back home. He called the fallen soldiers “martyrs” who showed the world North Korea’s military might.

Kim, absorbing North Korea’s first major combat losses in many decades, has lavished surviving families with banquets, gold medals and new Pyongyang apartments. The houses sit on a street called “Morning Star” in Korean.

It was named so, Kim told the families, to signify the troops’ brilliant exploits.

Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com and Timothy W. Martin at Timothy.Martin@wsj.com