April 10, 2026: Protests toppling governments happened in Armenia in 2018; Algeria, Bolivia, and Sudan in 2019; Sri Lanka in 2022; Bangladesh in 2024; and Madagascar in 2025. Currently, the American President is calling on Iranians to overthrow their Islamic dictatorship and replace it with a democracy. Before the 1980s, when the Islamic tyrants took over, Iran was a constitutional monarchy, complete with elections and excellent diplomatic and economic relations with Israel. In January 2026, Iran’s Islamic dictatorship killed more than 30,000 of its citizens for daring to demonstrate against Islamic rule.

Protests can succeed. Crucial to the success of protests are two factors: their enormous size, drawing crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and the rapid disintegration of the ruling group, with members of the military, the judiciary, and the government bureaucracy distancing themselves from the administration. This doesn’t always work, and that may or may not be the case with contemporary Iran.

The United States is often thought of as being inconsistent and supporting tyrants, even as America overthrew one in Iraq. Alas, America’s support for tyrants is basically a myth. As with any nation dating back several thousand years, the United States has always supported foreign governments willing to refrain from attacking American citizens or American economic and diplomatic interests. The U.S. government was generally praised for its statesmanlike behavior in supporting some dictatorships.

Remember the U.S. establishing relations with Yugoslavia and China? Ideology was rarely a factor here. To do otherwise just produces lots of headaches and threats to American citizens overseas. Critics often point to the many times American agents, CIA or otherwise, have interfered with foreign governments, or even overthrown them. This practice long predates the founding of the United States. After all, it was French interference that helped us get out from under British control during that time. It became less fashionable, over the last half-century, to conduct diplomacy that way, but that does not change the fact that gunboat diplomacy was an accepted practice for thousands of years. You can change your methods, but you can’t change history.

American interference in Yugoslavia, Kosovo in 1999, and Iraq in 2003 were cases of this ancient practice. Both were meant to deal with troublesome tyrants, and both were widely criticized by other nations, many because they knew they also qualified for similar humanitarian treatment. Note that the last time Iraq was invaded was in 1941, when Iraq’s decision to side with the Germans caused Britain to send a few divisions to march on Baghdad and replace the government. At the time, this was considered prudent diplomacy.

But Kosovo in 1999 and Iraq in 2003 were the kind of operations that would hardly have caused much comment before the 20th century. As the old saying goes, nations don’t have friends, only interests. And interests tend to change over time. During the Cold War, most governments worldwide were right-wing or left-wing dictatorships. Both flavors were pretty brutal, although the leftists had a much higher body count, less effective economic policies, but better PR. Still, the U.S. would do business with anyone who would leave the United States alone. Thus, we always found ourselves with friends on both sides of the Arab-Israeli wars and many other international disputes as well. Going out of your way to not support a country that a tyrant runs is a dangerous and often thankless business. Politicians and diplomats have enough problems on their plates without going and looking for more. Everyone supports tyrants if these thugs seem securely in control of a nation. To do otherwise just gets you condemned in the United Nations, which refused to approve of the 1999 Kosovo or 2003 Iraq operations. It's not supporting tyrants that gets America in trouble, but removing them.