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I think both observers on both the left and right in this country greatly overestimate the the extent to which anything the rest the world does affects the internal political dynamics of Iran.

IMO, the increasingly corrupt and repressive nature of the Islamic regime in Tehran is going to be one of the chief forces destabilizing and subverting dreams of Islamic theocracy worldwide: for a while it looked as though Iran might be able to establish some sort of reasonably successful combination of representative government under theocratic dictat that might have endured for generations and become a model for much of the rest of the Islamic world, instead the forces which inevitably decay theocracy have operated rapidly and dramatically to the reduce legitimacy of the model.

Theocracys are are inherently even more unstable than other types of dictatorships - all forms of highly centralized political power rapidly breed corruption and economic inefficiency, however if you are claiming to be ruling in God’s name your failures can have only one of two causes: either you are the representative of a false god, or or you are the illegitimate representative of the true god, in either case you are clearly unfit to rule. The Christian West spent 400 bloody years establishing this paradox as practical fact, today our failures are in our own, their sources are seen as human failings, and government by directed by divine revelation is seen for what it is - the theocratic pretensions of power-hungry human beings - and we look to religion for set of governing principles, not a detailed political program.

Political Islam is going through this process on a crash basis, because an alternative roles for religion do not have to be imagined and invented, they can be observed by looking beyond their borders to modern Western states where religion coexists with representative government.

If Tehran have presented some viable alternative, it would’ve greatly slowed this process. Instead it presents the image of a corrupt Clerical class claiming the right to rule as God’s direct representatives on earth, aligned with an authoritarian and politicized military, incapable of rational or effective economic governance, intolerant of its own people’s will, and increasingly driven to thwart it through subversion of representative government.

In short, it looks like the various kinds of secular religions (communism, fascism, “Arab socialism” and the like) and the like which blighted the lives of the peoples of much of the world throughout the 20th century.

Under these conditions not only to the people below the ruling elites lose confidence in the system, eventually the elites loose it themselves - this only took about 40 years in the case of communism (roughly, from around 1950, as it became clear that progress toward both social justice and economic growth was much higher in Western capitalist and “mixed economies”) and I don’t see any reason to suppose that will happen much faster - or more slowly - in Islamic theocracys.

What can we do to speed the process up?

IMO, there are two things that matter: 1) continued improvement or at least reasonable stability of conditions in Western economies and 2) not unnecessarily aiding repressive governments in claiming that other systems are responsible for their problems.

We have to see our legitimate national security interests, but there’s little point in engaging in inflammatory rhetoric or inefficient confrontational policies to “make a point” or “take a moral stand” - the moral goal in such cases should to engage in behavior which destabilizes such regimes, rather than to allow them to whip up public sentiment and blame outsiders for the failures of their system. For example history suggests that most boycotts and sanctions fall into the category of “things which make us feel good, rather than things to do good” unless, as for example the case of South Africa, they’re pretty much universally observed by the international community and pretty much universally supported by public opinion.

And this is where I think Hanson has got it wrong: theocratic Islam in its regimes don’t pose “existential threats” to either the West or other non-Islamic societiess: they are neither serious economic, social or political challenges to those already living in such societies, and the “challenges” they present are the purely practical challenges of ordinary political confrontation and “containment”; the rest of the world is not going to be challenged by in a by technological innovation and economic dynamism from Islamic societies, Islam is not attractive religion to the religious or secular in Western cultures and its authoritarian, anti-iintellectual and patriarchal nature makes it completely unsuitable as a social alternative, and as the clear trend in Western culture (for better or worse) is toward increasing secularization, the political threat of establishing Islamic theocracy is nil.

(Even in the Western European countries with the highest proportions of Islamic them are immigrants the immigrants remain minorities, and the rapidly changing demographics of Islamic immigrant communities makes it apparent that they will retain minority status).

So I don’t see much point in making a point of the obvious superiority of our system or the obviously bleak future of Islamic theocracy, the superiority is obvious to unbiased observers, and to biased observers Western condemnation of Islamic regimes reinforces their bias, allows their leaders to blame us for their problems, and forestalls rather than advances the decay of their systems.