The British historian Timothy Garton Ash, who’s seen a few popular uprisings over the past quarter century, writes this in an essay called “Velvet Revolution in Past and Future,” from his recent collection “Facts Are Subversive”:

One might suggest that the best chances are to be found in semiauthoritarian states that depend to a significant degree, politically, economically and, so to speak, psychologically, on more democratic ones—and most especially when the foreign states with the most passive influence or active leverage on them are Western democracies.

When the people rise up, there’s no guarantee they’ll succeed. Just ask a Burmese or an Iranian. Egypt’s revolution has a number of counts against it, the main one being the hollow core where Egyptian civil society ought to be—the absence of institutions, groups, and leaders that could shape this massive expression of popular will into an organized counterforce to the regime’s violence, with the means to reach deep into the military hierarchy and a strategy for victory. Instead, Mubarak systematically closed off that space, so that he could say to the world: me or the Islamists, choose. In Burma in 2007, there was a similar void of opposition leadership, other than the moral power of the monks. Young Burmese later told me that they considered their headless revolution more flexible and durable than the older kind—one student called it “post-modern”—but the regime crushed it without much trouble, and hundreds of young Burmese are now rotting away in far-flung prisons.

Iran, on the other hand, had the key elements for popular success in 2009: a broad and alienated middle class, organized groups of civil society, professional journalists, a sophisticated political opposition. If you ignored the regime for a moment, Iran would have seemed a likelier candidate for a victorious velvet revolution than, say, East Germany in 1989, whose opposition consisted of a few pacifist churches and scattered writers and artists. But the regime made all the difference. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Basij paramilitaries remained loyal and were ready, even eager, to inflict limitless violence. Ill-informed observers have shed a lot of ink explaining that certain authoritarian regimes stay in power because of the country’s religion, its culture, its people’s passivity or respect for authority or love of pleasure. In fact, the reason is much simpler. The difference between success and failure, between the Philippines and Burma, the Soviet Union and China, Poland and Iran, comes down to the willingness of security forces to fire their weapons into unarmed crowds. Very few people will stay in the main square once it’s certain they’ll be mowed down.

Where does Egypt fall in this modern history of non-violent revolution? The Mubarak regime seems like an ideal candidate for collapse. In Garton Ash’s terms, it depends on the West—not least, on billions in American military aid. Unlike Iran, it has no revolutionary energy, however degraded, to muster in its own defense. Unlike Zimbabwe, it is open to the world and the world’s scrutiny—which is why the regime, having allowed the foreign press to enter en masse, is now trying to shut it down. Unlike Burma, which has neighboring China, Egypt lacks any powerful regional ally to bolster its economy and uphold its case to the world.

And yet the regime hasn’t collapsed, not yet. Mubarak’s thuggishness turns out to be as ferocious as the Egyptian people knew it to be, and if the West is surprised that he’s fighting back, perhaps that’s because we’ve always turned away from the regime’s true character, as long as tourists were welcome and the violence was directed at Islamists and those luckless Egyptians who happened to fall into the hands of the police. Under assault, the brave determination of the mass of people in Tahrir Square, and elsewhere, could use the support of leaders and groups with the toughness and vision to absorb the blows and persist, to find friends in unlikely places, including abroad. The lack of organization is the second greatest threat to the movement’s staying power.

In 1986, at the climax of the original People Power revolt, President Reagan sent Senator Paul Laxalt to Manila to tell Ferdinand Marcos that it was time to leave—and Marcos left. That kind of paternalism is not possible today, not in the Middle East, not after Iraq, not in the age of Al Jazeera, not with the foreign-policy views of President Obama. Ambassador Frank Wisner went to Egypt to deliver a more cautious message than Laxalt’s, and the violence grew worse, and Wisner came home. There’s no reason to think a direct order from the White House would have had any success.

From the start, the Administration has been reacting to rather than anticipating events in Egypt, always a step behind. And yet Obama’s public words, and what we can surmise about his non-public diplomacy, have seemed right to me, if a day late. He understands the limits of American leverage over Mubarak and the pitfalls of American heavy-handedness in the region. What Obama can be faulted for is not his “handling” of the current crisis, but his mistaken belief, upon taking office, that Muslims in places like Egypt wanted American respect first and last. His Cairo speech, in June 2009, was the fullest expression of that belief. It was long on understanding and dialogue, and short on human rights and democracy. As I wrote last year, when Obama finally got around to these topics, his first rhetorical move was to condemn American meddling. But his Cairo audience was already applauding the word “democracy,” which caused Obama to stumble over his speech. He and they were in different places, and in a sense, the U.S. has been stumbling to catch up ever since. In reaching out to the Islamic world, Obama never made the crucial distinction between the people and the regimes that rule them. Administration policy in Egypt has allowed Mubarak to crush the few remaining pockets of breathing space for civil society and the political opposition. It’s a policy that goes back decades, one that neither Obama nor George W. Bush did much to change. The dramatic events of the past week have shown it to be an utter failure.

Read more from our coverage of the protests in Egypt and beyond.

Photograph: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images.