It has been a bad year for right-wing dictatorships—and for the U.S., which has often supported them. First Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran, then General Anastasio Somoza Debayle of Nicaragua were swept into exile by largely home-grown revolutions. Each had long been taken for granted as the absolute ruler of his country and as a friend of the U.S. Yet in the end, Somoza's national guard, cloned from the U.S. Marine Corps, was as ineffective against the Sandinista guerrillas as the Shah's army and secret police—the best that petro-billions could buy—were against the mostly unarmed followers of a cranky, theocratic graybeard, the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini.
At the climactic moment, U.S. friendship for this Persian Ozymandias and this quintessential banana-republic strongman did not seem to count for much. His Imperial Majesty the King of Kings became overnight an international outcast with a price on his head, wandering from Egypt to Morocco to the Bahamas to Mexico, discouraged from seeking asylum in the U.S. When Somoza desperately tried to telephone from his bunker to Jimmy Carter for help, the White House switchboard shunted the call to the State Department, where Somoza left a message. Cyrus Vance cabled him back, urging him to quit.
The sudden and ignominious collapse of the Pahlavi and Somoza dynasties came as a shock to Americans and raised troubling questions. How can the U.S. determine which dictatorships are relatively stable and which are unstable or transitory, and how should the U.S. deal with them?
Few Americans have ever felt entirely comfortable with their Government's support for clearly and often cruelly undemocratic regimes. When an old fascist like Spain's Francisco Franco died in 1975, thus finally permitting the restoration of democracy, or when the junta of Greek Colonels self-destructed in 1974 by instigating an abortive coup in Cyprus and made way for the return of Constantine Caramanlis, the U.S. reacted with general relief. Still, the world is full of dictatorships, the U.S. has to deal with most of them, and simply condemning them on moral grounds is not a policy. Support for many of these regimes is widely accepted as necessary in a divided and dangerous world. Since the height of the cold war, American policymakers have been saying of one right-wing despot or another, as Franklin Roosevelt is supposed to have said of Somoza's dictatorial father "Tacho" in the late 1930s, & "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."
The Soviet Union has its client dictators too. Rather than just tolerating leftist tyrannies, the Kremlin justifies them with dogma and defends them with tanks. Those that call themselves socialist and persecute in the name of the proletariat often seem more enduring than ideologically reactionary, avowedly anti-Communist dictatorships. Most of their staying power is due to the Soviet tanks, ready to roll over incipient democratization as they did in Prague in 1968. Political geography also helps leftist totalitarianism. It has been most durable in Eastern Europe, wedged snugly within the postwar Soviet sphere of influence, though even in that bloc there have been occasional upheavals and gradual evolutions, as witness the sporadic steps toward some liberalism in Hungary, Poland and Rumania.