When authoritarian regimes start to wobble, outside observers often reach instinctively for the single, familiar idea of ‘the alternative’. It is a human reflex, but a dangerous one. In Iran, as the clerical theocracy shows signs of fracture and the country’s crisis deepens, some Western voices have begun to flirt with a thought that feels neat and historically legible: the return of the Shah’s son. That would be a profound mistake.

Iran doesn’t need a restoration

Iran’s tragedy since 1979 has been that an autocracy was replaced by another autocracy. The lesson should be plain: changing the personality at the top is not enough. What matters is the nature of the state and the source of its legitimacy. Iran does not need a restoration. It needs a foundation for a democratic future.

It has been argued that Reza Pahlavi could play a unifying role, perhaps as a symbolic constitutional monarch. But this misunderstands both Iran’s recent history and the political psychology of revolutions. The last Shah was not a constitutional monarch in the British sense. His rule was marked by coercion, political exclusion, and the suppression of opposition. Whatever one thinks of the scale of Iran’s material progress during that era, the Shah’s state was not built on consent, but on........

© The Spectator