The collapse of the Islamic Republic – if it comes – does not automatically deliver Iran into the hands of Reza Pahlavi, and the assumption that it should reveals more about Washington’s appetite for convenient narratives than about the political reality of a ninety-million-person nation whose relationship with monarchy is far more complicated than the diaspora rallies in Los Angeles suggest. Pahlavi is not a government-in-waiting. He is a symbol – and symbols, as any student of revolutionary history knows, are the most dangerous things to confuse with institutions.

Begin with the inconvenient archaeology of the Pahlavi dynasty itself, because the Islamic Republic did not materialize from a theological vacuum. It was born from the carcass of a monarchy that, for all its modernizing veneer, governed through SAVAK – one of the most feared secret police apparatuses in the Cold War world, trained by the CIA and Mossad, responsible for the systematic torture, disappearance, and execution of political dissidents across the ideological spectrum.

The Pahlavi dynasty built progress without consent

The Pahlavi project was, from its inception, an act of civilizational imitation. Reza Khan – an illiterate military officer who overthrew the decrepit Qajar dynasty in a 1925 coup and crowned himself Shah – modeled his entire modernization program on Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s Turkey, watching from across the border as the founder of the Turkish Republic abolished the caliphate, adopted the Latin alphabet, banned the fez, secularized the courts, and dragged a post-Ottoman society into the twentieth century by its collar.

Reza Shah imported the template wholesale: compulsory Western dress, the forced unveiling of women, the construction of railways and factories, the establishment of Tehran University, the confiscation of clerical land endowments, and the systematic marginalization of the Shia ulama from public life.

He initially wanted to declare Iran a republic, as Atatürk had done, but abandoned the idea under British and clerical pressure and settled instead for a new dynasty – the critical divergence that would define everything that followed. Where Atatürk built institutions, however imperfectly, Reza Shah built a personality cult. Where Atatürk envisioned an eventual democratic tutelage, Reza Shah openly embraced what he called “one-man rule.”

The modernization was real – industrial output increased seventeenfold, highways expanded from two thousand to fourteen thousand miles, free compulsory education was introduced for both sexes – but it was modernization without consent, progress without participation, Westernization without the Western contract between state and citizen.

His son, Mohammad Reza Shah, inherited both the ambition and the deficiency. And the result, forty years later, was a population that had been given roads, hospitals, and universities but never a voice, which is precisely why, when Khomeini offered them one, they took it.

During his reign, Iran was a developmental autocracy of the classic Third World variety: rapid industrialization, aggressive secularization, cosmopolitan aesthetics in Tehran’s northern districts, and a boot on the throat of anyone who questioned the arrangement. The White Revolution of 1963 – land reform, women’s suffrage, literacy campaigns – was genuine modernization imposed by genuine authoritarianism, and its benefits accrued overwhelmingly to the urban elite while the rural poor and the traditional merchant class, the bazaaris, watched their economic autonomy dissolve under state-directed capitalism that enriched the court and its cronies.

When Khomeini thundered against the Shah from exile in Najaf, he was not speaking into silence. He was amplifying a grievance that had been accumulating for decades across every stratum of Iranian society – leftist intellectuals, Marxist guerrillas of the Tudeh Party and the Mujahedin-e Khalq, nationalist liberals of the National Front, and the clerical establishment that saw its institutional authority being systematically dismantled by a monarch who fancied himself Cyrus reincarnated.

The 1970s’ Iran was undeniably steeped in religious fervor, and Wilayat al-Faqih functioned as the Shia equivalent of what the Muslim Brotherhood and Wahhabi revivalism were simultaneously achieving across the Sunni Arab world: a fusion of political Islam with anti-Western liberation theology that captured an entire generation at the precise historical moment when post-colonial identity movements were at their zenith.

This is the part the Pahlavi nostalgia industry prefers to omit: the 1979 revolution was not an Islamist coup imposed on a contented nation. It was a genuinely popular, multi-ideological uprising in which Khomeini outmaneuvered every other faction – the communists, the liberals, the nationalists – with superior organizational discipline, a nationwide mosque network that functioned as a parallel communication infrastructure, and the ruthless willingness to eliminate his erstwhile allies once power was consolidated.

The revolution devoured its own children, as revolutions do, and the Islamic Republic that emerged was a betrayal of nearly every constituency that had fought to bring it about – except the clerical establishment itself. But the original sin that made the revolution possible was not Islam. It was the Shah’s refusal to permit the organic development of civil society, political pluralism, and institutional accountability – the very deficiencies that Pahlavi’s “Emergency Phase” plan now promises to remedy from a Maryland suburb forty-seven years after the fact.

Mossadegh and the original sin of 1953

And then there is the darkest chapter in the Pahlavi ledger – the one that the monarchist diaspora would prefer to bury beneath the nostalgia of Tehran’s pre-revolutionary nightlife but that every serious Iranian carries like a scar: the destruction of Iranian democracy itself. In 1951, Mohammad Mossadegh – a constitutionally elected prime minister, an incorruptible nationalist with a doctorate from the University of Neuchâtel, and the most popular political figure in modern Iranian history – committed the unforgivable transgression of nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, which had been controlled since 1913 by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the corporate ancestor of British Petroleum.

The profits were staggering, the asymmetry obscene: Britain extracted billions while Iranian workers labored in conditions that the company’s own internal reports described as deplorable, and the Iranian state received a fraction of the revenue that Saudi Arabia had already negotiated from Aramco under a fifty-fifty profit-sharing arrangement. Mossadegh’s nationalization passed unanimously through Iran’s parliament. It was lawful, constitutional, and democratically enacted. And for precisely this reason, it was intolerable.

Britain, unwilling to accept the loss of its most lucrative overseas asset, imposed a crippling naval blockade, froze Iranian assets, and – when economic strangulation failed to break Mossadegh – turned to covert action. MI6 designed Operation Boot; the CIA, under Eisenhower’s newly hawkish administration, provided the muscle under the codename Operation Ajax.

The pretext was communism – the fiction that Mossadegh, an avowed anti-communist who had marginalized the Tudeh Party, would deliver Iran to Moscow. The reality was petroleum. On August 19, 1953, CIA-funded agents, hired street thugs, bribed military officers, and co-opted clerics – including, in a historical irony so bitter it tastes of ash, a young and then-obscure mullah named Ruhollah Khomeini, who supported the coup against Mossadegh – orchestrated the overthrow of Iran’s last democratically elected government.

Mossadegh was arrested, tried in a military court, and spent the remainder of his life under house arrest until his death in 1967. Mohammad Reza Shah was restored to full autocratic power, and within months a new oil consortium was established: British Petroleum retained forty percent, American companies including Exxon and Mobil received a substantial share, and Iran – the country whose oil it was – was permitted to keep a larger percentage than before but lost all meaningful control over pricing, production, and downstream distribution. Nationalization survived as a word. Control returned to the West as a fact.

This is the wound that no amount of Pahlavi revisionism can absolve – and it is the betrayal that explains, more than any theological treatise by Khomeini, why the 1979 revolution happened. The United States and Britain did not merely support an authoritarian monarch; they destroyed the only democratic government Iran had ever produced, and they did it for oil.

The Shah who followed ruled for twenty-six years as a Western client – his military armed by Washington, his secret police trained by Langley and Tel Aviv, his oil flowing westward at prices Washington found acceptable – until the accumulated rage of a population that had been denied self-governance for a quarter century finally detonated in a revolution that, tragically, replaced one form of tyranny with another. The Islamic Republic is Khomeini’s creation, but its preconditions were manufactured in London and Washington in the summer of 1953.

And this is precisely why the current American enthusiasm for regime change in Iran must be read with both eyes open. Washington does not want a free Iran. It wants a compliant Iran – an Iran whose oil flows westward, whose foreign policy aligns with American strategic interests, whose military buys American hardware, and whose government does not threaten Israel or obstruct Gulf energy markets.

The United States already has access to Gulf oil through Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar – but Iran sits on the world’s fourth-largest proven oil reserves and the second-largest natural gas reserves on earth, a hydrocarbon treasury that has been locked behind sanctions and theocratic mismanagement for nearly half a century. A post-Islamic Republic Iran integrated into Western energy markets would reshape the global oil landscape, weaken Russia’s leverage over European energy supply, and generate what Pahlavi himself estimated as over one trillion dollars in economic opportunity for American companies in the first decade alone.

The strategic logic is identical to 1953: Iran’s resources are too valuable to be left in the hands of a government Washington cannot control. The vocabulary has changed – “democracy promotion” has replaced “anti-communism” as the justifying rhetoric – but the underlying calculus has not moved an inch.

And the final, almost cosmic irony: Russia, which in the Cold War was the phantom threat invoked to justify overthrowing Mossadegh, is today reportedly providing intelligence and targeting data to the very Iranian regime that America is now bombing. The ghosts of Operation Ajax must be watching with considerable bewilderment as the architects of the original sin and its unintended consequences collide, seventy-three years later, over the same patch of oil-soaked earth.

Washington wants a compliant Iran, not a free one

The Western infatuation with Pahlavi is not difficult to decode. Under the Shah, Iran was the West’s most reliable regional gendarme – a pillar of Nixon’s Twin Pillar policy, an oil supplier of strategic magnitude, an Israeli ally, a bulwark against Soviet expansion, and a market for American and European arms manufacturers whose contracts ran into the billions.

A restored Pahlavi-adjacent Iran – secular, pro-Western, nuclear-disarmed (although Iran pursued nuclear ambitions during the Shah’s era and initiated this program), commercially open, strategically aligned with Washington and Tel Aviv – would represent the single most consequential geopolitical realignment since the fall of the Soviet Union. Trump’s transparent interest, Netanyahu’s calculated embrace, and the Pentagon’s barely concealed preference for a pliant successor state all point in the same direction: Pahlavi is the West’s candidate, and the West is not even pretending otherwise.

But Iran is not the West’s to assign. And here is where the analysis must resist the seductive gravitational pull of both the monarchist diaspora and the Washington policy establishment and confront the sociological reality on the ground. Polls conducted as recently as November 2025 by Dutch pollster Ammar Maleki show Pahlavi’s support at roughly one-third of the Iranian population – higher than any other individual opposition figure, but hardly a mandate. Another third actively opposes him. The remaining third is undecided, fragmented, or indifferent – a distribution that reflects not apathy but the genuine heterogeneity of a society that has spent forty-seven years under theocratic rule and has no consensus on what should replace it.

The Kurds want federalism. The Baloch want autonomy. The Azeris want linguistic recognition. The secular urban middle class wants liberal democracy. The conservative rural poor – the very constituency Khomeini mobilized in 1979 – wants economic relief more than ideological transformation. And the IRGC’s vast economic empire, which controls an estimated one-third to two-thirds of Iran’s non-oil economy, has created an entire class of beneficiaries whose interests are tied not to any ideology but to the survival of the institutional structures that enrich them.

A Pahlavi restoration that dismantles the IRGC without addressing the economic dependencies it has created risks producing not liberation but the kind of institutional collapse that turned post-Saddam Iraq into a failed state.

A nation too complex for any single savior

The deeper irony – and it is an irony worth dwelling on – is that the 1979 revolution occurred at the historical apex of two converging global currents: Third World anti-colonial liberation movements and the resurgence of political Islam as a vehicle for post-colonial identity assertion. Frantz Fanon’s wretched of the earth found an unlikely ally in Khomeini’s dispossessed faithful, and the synthesis produced a revolution that was simultaneously anti-Western, anti-monarchical, and anti-secular in a way that made perfect ideological sense in the late 1970s – when the Non-Aligned Movement still mattered, when Nasser’s ghost still haunted Arab politics, and when the failure of Western-backed modernization projects from Tehran to Saigon had discredited the entire developmental paradigm.

Iran in 2026 is a fundamentally different society. The median Iranian is twenty-nine years old, born after the revolution, raised under sanctions, educated despite the theocracy, connected to the world through VPNs the regime cannot fully control, and possessed of a secular sensibility that is not ideological but experiential – the product of living under a system that has demonstrated, with forty-seven years of empirical evidence, that clerical governance produces neither prosperity nor justice nor dignity.

This is not a population waiting to be saved; it is one of the most educated, intellectually sophisticated societies in the Middle East – a nation that produced Kiarostami, Farhadi, and Panahi, whose cinema alone is sufficient evidence that the Iranian mind operates at a level of complexity, subtlety, and humanistic depth that no theocracy could extinguish and no Western savior needs to awaken.

The Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022, the recent December-January uprising, and the spontaneous celebrations that erupted across Iranian cities upon Khamenei’s death all confirm what every serious Iran analyst has known for a decade: the Islamic Republic has lost the Iranian people. The question is not whether the theocracy will fall. The question is what replaces it – and the answer cannot be dictated by Washington, imposed by Tel Aviv, or inherited by bloodline.

The right words cannot erase the wrong history

Pahlavi, to his credit, has said the right things: transitional leadership, not permanent rule; referendum, not restoration; constitutional assembly, not coronation. His April 2025 Iran Prosperity Project and its Emergency Phase Booklet contain concrete commitments – IAEA inspections within the first week, full nuclear transparency within the first month, free elections under international oversight.

These are not trivial pledges. But students of Iranian history cannot suppress the uncomfortable echo: Khomeini, too, promised a democratic transition in 1979. He, too, said the clerics would not govern directly. He, too, invoked the will of the people – until the people’s will became inconvenient, at which point the Revolutionary Guards ensured that inconvenience was resolved permanently.

Iran does not need another savior parachuted in from exile with a plan drafted in a foreign language for a foreign audience. It needs what it has never been permitted to develop: the slow, unglamorous, institutionally tedious construction of a political order that derives its legitimacy not from divine sanction, not from dynastic inheritance, not from American approval, but from the freely expressed, periodically renewed, constitutionally constrained consent of the governed.

The Pahlavis had their chance and produced SAVAK. The clerics had their chance and produced the Basij. The next Iran must be built by Iranians who have survived both – and who owe their allegiance to neither crown nor turban, but to the simple, revolutionary, and still-unrealized proposition that the people of Iran are sovereign over themselves.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)