A quote sometimes attributed to Trotsky is that “revolution is impossible until it is inevitable.” Not for the first or last time, Trotsky was wrong, and as the leader of a well-organized revolutionary movement who’d watched the Czar crush the rebellion of 1905, he certainly knew better. There is a tendency for events that were once chaotic, precarious, and ultimately consequential to seem inevitable once they’re chiseled into our tablets. Today, an equally dismissive approach suggests that those events were inevitable. In fact, they were neither.

The error of assuming impossibility is more forgivable. For me, the fall of The Wall is among a few of those “I remember where I was” moments. In Rapid City, South Dakota, that was a miserably cold day, and ironically, I was a driving a Chinese friend and fellow student to the grocery store. Yes, it was clear that discontent in the Warsaw Pact countries was rising. At the time, I was one who believed then that revolution was inevitable, though in retrospect, that belief seems difficult to support. Events in my friend’s country just months before had proven that the Warsaw Pact could also have survived through sheer brutality.

This parade rolled through East Berlin just a month before the wall fell. Look at the phalanxes of armor, the rogues’ gallery (at 1:15, complete with North Koreans) in the reviewing stand, and the smug confidence on Honnecker’s face. The only word that describes it is “invincible:”

When the moment of decision came, however, the same army that had been shooting down border crossers for years held its fire. Why? Had the soldiers opened fire, I don’t doubt that there would still be an East Germany, even without a Soviet Union to back it.

The case of Romania is more extraordinary, and even more illustrative of history’s tendency to pivot on the tempers and moods of individuals who find themselves at decisive places and times. On December 20, 1989, a reasonable conclusion might have been that an abortive uprising in the city of Timisoara, a city heavily populated by ethnic Hungarians, had been suppressed, and that Ceausescu’s security forces and party stood firmly behind him. Ceausescu stood on the balcony of his palace before a crowd of thousands, no doubt most of them hand-picked, bused-in loyalists, to flaunt his power:

We may never know why one angry man among thousands acted on his urge to shout blasphemous words at Europe’s most dreaded tyrant. When he cursed the tyrant, others in that crowd either overcame their fear or acted on their desperation. Look at the fear in Ceausescu’s eyes as grasps the significance of that instant, in which his loyalists turn to jeering rebels.

The Genius of the Danube was ushered through the back door leading toward the helipad.

All history is inevitable in hindsight, but what we accept as inevitable now would have been as empirically grounded as a horoscope if predicted the instant before it happened. We can say that people do not like to be deprived, oppressed, stifled, or abused, that inevitably, they will resent this, and that the resentment will build with time. But anyone who mistakes the inevitability of dissent with the inevitability that it will prevail should ask any survivor of Tienanmen Square, or any citizen of Rangoon, Lhasa, Pyongyang, or Tehran if that necessarily follows. To break free and live by their own will, people need courage. Sometimes, our encouragement is enough to give it to them. At other times, it isn’t.

If it is a matter of general agreement that President Obama has not earned a Nobel Prize, and that the award was more embarrassment than recognition, I am prepared to go so far as to agree with our president that he has a gift. President Obama now faces a choice between making history and earning that prize or flunking the chance to encourage millions to demand what is theirs. Let’s take the clearest case first:

I marvel that they still dare to resist. I hope they make it. We ought to be standing with them, and it’s still plausible to think that a hard shove from the people of Iran would transform their country as radically and beneficially as the events of 1989 transformed Europe.

President Obama will also be visiting South Korea soon, and in the Wall Street Journal, Melanie Kirkpatrick sees an opportunity for Barack Obama’s “tear down this wall” moment:

If that’s so, here’s a suggestion: When he’s in Seoul this month, Mr. Obama could meet with refugees and hear their horror stories of life in their homeland. Even better, he could visit the offices of Radio Free Asia, Voice of America or Free North Korea Radio (run by refugees) and broadcast a message of support to the North Korean people themselves.

That is necessarily a more cautious approach, as it should be. There is little question that if challenged by a popular uprising, the rulers of North Korea would order a slaughter and get their wish. We saw that in Rangoon recently, when that country’s junta slaughtered hundreds (and perhaps thousands) of monks to crush a burgeoning popular uprising. North Korea’s unrestrained will to use force and its successful isolation of its people from the world — and each other — explains why years of unreported resistance have failed to overthrow it. It will take time to break down North Korea’s information blockade and cultish discipline, and for North Korea’s people to organize and build an opposition movement, before the people will be able to challenge the system without provoking anything more than mass slaughter. This was so after the events of 1953, 1956, and 1968, but that only encouraged us to redouble efforts like Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, and to continue our support for Soviet dissidents, and for groups like Solidarity and Charter 77.

A common argument against speaking out about against the abuses of tyrannies is that doing so would be harmful to our nuclear diplomacy, but in the case of North Korea, we’ve seen that its regime has always been ready to negotiate at expedient moments, notwithstanding — maybe even because of — sanctions and outside pressure. None of the bold statements President Bush made during his first term prevented the North Koreans from attending six-party talks, or from signing deals with the Bush Administration in 2005 or 2007 (though for other reasons, the North Koreans never negotiated in good faith, and no quantity of gold stars and cookies will change that).

The fact that President Bush also missed his own “tear down this wall” moment doesn’t get Obama off the hook for not speaking out. Bush hadn’t a fraction of Obama’s eloquence, and if Iran and North Korea are still vocally refusing to disarm, wouldn’t this be an ideal moment to put that gift to good use, and even arguably to make a balloon payment on a Nobel Prize that as of today, is a symbol of an unpaid debt to peace?

(Author’s note: passages in this essay are adapted from blog postings here, here, and here.)

Joshua Stanton, a former JAG officer, is an attorney in Washington, DC.