The Distant Promise of Iran’s Would-Be King
For about three weeks, Reza Pahlavi, the sixty-five-year-old son of the deposed Shah of Iran, appeared to be the most obvious figure to lead an overthrow of the Islamic Republic. The protests that broke out across the country at the end of December were triggered by the collapse of the rial and exorbitant inflation in food prices. But they soon came to target the whole theocracy and its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. On January 6th, Pahlavi sought to seize the moment, issuing a video message in which he called on Iranians to join together and chant slogans against the regime from their homes and in the streets. Two days later, Iran witnessed an unprecedented wave of protests, with demonstrations held in more than a hundred and fifty cities. In the capital, streams of people converged on overpasses and boulevards, calling not just for the end of the regime but for the return of Pahlavi himself, chanting “Long live the Shah.”
For years, Pahlavi had presented himself as a unifying figure, in keeping with a tradition of Iranian kingship as the glue that had held the fractious Persian Empire together. His strategists, ancien-régime figures who had surrounded him for nearly thirty years, believed that an inclusive approach would showcase his ability to lead and secure potential backers in the U.S. and in Europe. As recently as 2022, Pahlavi was trying to work within the often quarrelsome sphere of Iranian diaspora politics. During the Women, Life, Freedom movement that fall, prominent activists in Washington, D.C., were vying to take credit for sparking the nationwide protests. When a coalition of figures assembled at a Georgetown University forum, in February, 2023, the former Crown Prince sat humbly in a row of eight, alongside two actresses, a soccer player, and an Iranian Kurdish separatist.
Various strands of the opposition—ethnic minorities, leftists, and educated technocrats—appeared determined to block him, even at the price of leaving the regime in place. By then, Pahlavi was surrounded by a younger entourage of analysts and advisers, some of whom were brash figures once associated with the country’s reformist student movement. “I could imagine his advisers telling him, ‘You’re the King. You can’t surround yourself with people who don’t even acknowledge or respect your station,’ ” an Iranian analyst in Washington told me.
That April, two months after the Georgetown event, Pahlavi announced on X that he would no longer align himself with any single dissident group, a gesture that effectively positioned him as a leader of the opposition above all others. “When I was serving as his strategic counsellor, his philosophy was ‘Today, only unity,’ ” Mehrdad Youssefiani, who served as Pahlavi’s chief of staff for seventeen years, said. “Now his social-media presence projects the image ‘Today only me.’ To the critical audiences he needs to draw into his coalition, that’s an imperial posture that belies all his rhetoric of inclusive coalition.”
During the next two years, Pahlavi expanded his operation and deepened his ties with Israel. In 2023, he visited Jerusalem, where he posed for photos with Benjamin Netanyahu and Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, and visited Yad Vashem and the Wailing Wall. Pahlavi’s embrace of Israel risked alienating some of his potential supporters in Iran, but it also aligned him with a country committed to the destruction of the Islamic Republic which could also help him gain traction with policymakers in the U.S. By 2025, Gila Gamliel, the Israeli minister of science and technology, was saying to the press that she and Pahlavi had discussed a peace accord that would follow the fall of the Iranian regime “next year in Tehran.”
In early January, state security forces used military-style weapons to kill thousands of protesters, exhibiting a level of violence that shocked even the regime’s most hardened opponents. The state was already on the verge of economic collapse, and Donald Trump, in close coördination with Israel, seemed intent on launching a military confrontation. Pahlavi’s team began putting out various plans to further erode the regime’s authority, calling on workers to strike and releasing a QR code through which defectors in the state security forces could sign on to his project, which Pahlavi claimed had elicited fifty thousand responses. At the same time, one of his advisers issued a blanket threat to Iranians inside the country who were “accomplices” to the regime: “You’re done for. Every last one of you.” If the U.S. had started conducting air strikes that week, delivering the support that Trump had promised the protesters, the demonstrations might have continued to grow.
Instead, the U.S. President slowly dispatched his armada to the Middle East, while his envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, held negotiations with Iranian officials. The regime was given weeks to regroup. Iranians retreated from the streets. Pahlavi, stuck in limbo, became less affable, more combative. At the Munich Security Conference, which Pahlavi attended in mid-February, two hundred thousand people converged on the city for a pro-Pahlavi demonstration. “Millions of Iranians chanted my name and called for my return,” he said. The calls were effectively a mandate “to be the leader of this transition as they have asked for.”
When Israel launched its attack on Iran, on February 28th, it called the campaign Operation Roaring Lion, seemingly a nod to the Iranian monarchy. But a U.S. intelligence report, assembled prior to the events of early January, which was shown to Trump a week before the start of the war, concluded that Pahlavi lacked a sufficient network inside the country to lead an overthrow of the regime. “They never took him that seriously,” Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins, said of the Administration. “There’s a difference between having an organization on the ground versus just having people who like you. If you’re going to help change a regime, you have to have a ground game.” Trump and his aides began referring to Pahlavi as the “loser prince.”
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, and his wife, Empress Farah, disagreed sharply on nearly every aspect of their son’s upbringing. The Shah, who wished to prepare Reza for his future role, believed that he should be tutored by tough military figures and immersed in Iranian society. The Empress preferred a more cloistered upbringing, with French nannies and hand-selected schoolmates. At one point, according to the published diaries of the Shah’s former court minister, Asadollah Alam, Reza was in the alarming thrall of Mademoiselle Joelle, his French governess, who filled his head with French history. “I heard the boy wanted to go hunting, but the French woman told him no—killing animals and birds is wrong,” Alam reported disapprovingly. Even small decisions, such as how the teen-age prince should commute to school—driving himself or chauffeured in a bulletproof Mercedes—held implications for the man Reza would become. “Better that he takes risks than that he ends up a shrinking violet like Ahmad Shah Qajar,” the Shah told his courtier, referring to the effete final monarch of the preceding dynasty.
Reza was eighteen when the Islamic Revolution overthrew his family’s reign, in 1979. At the time, he was at fighter-pilot training in Lubbock, Texas, part of his preparations for becoming a modern king. The Pahlavis, in exile, were vilified, but the family still appeared duty-bound to project the image of Reza as the dynastic heir of Iranian monarchy. The Empress, based between Greenwich, Connecticut, and Paris, remained socially enmeshed in Europe’s royal circles, but Reza stayed in the United States, completing a degree at the University of Southern California, and then living a suburban existence in Potomac, Maryland. On a podcast in 2023, he admitted that, despite having always insisted that he was fighting to unseat the regime, he never envisioned returning to Iran permanently. “My children live here,” he said. “My friends live here. Everybody that I know is here. If I was to go back, what do I go back to?”
In the early eighties, when Pahlavi was in his twenties, Ardeshir Zahedi, the Shah’s last Ambassador to the U.S., brokered meetings between Pahlavi and American officials. “The Americans at the time were quite hopeful they could get some results with Reza, but they soon lost confidence in him,” Tino Zahedi, one of Ardeshir’s cousins, told me. “They didn’t believe he could reign.” In the following years, reports emerged of Pahlavi accepting funds and support from the C.I.A. and from various Arab monarchies to run his small-scale political operations. (Pahlavi has always denied this.) Ardeshir Zahedi eventually parted with him, saying in later years that accepting financial backing from foreigners and essentially asking them to drop bombs on their own country was un-Iranian.
For years, Pahlavi kept up appearances, insisting that he was the rightful Crown Prince of Iran, refusing to acknowledge the abolition of the Pahlavi monarchy, and releasing messages to the nation at the Persian New Year. But he was not a decisive political figure. To those who knew his father, he cut a strange figure, neither common nor majestic but a suburban man of Maryland who shopped at the mall and attended a weekly poker game in Bethesda. He seemed resigned to exile and uncertain about the prospect of changing Iranians’ minds from afar. “He’s a good person, but he’s indolent, and he knows it himself,” an Iranian insider in Washington who knew Pahlavi in the eighties said.
In 2001, I interviewed Pahlavi for Time, and found him impressive. I was based in Tehran at the time, as an American-born foreign correspondent, and most of the Islamic Republic officials I met were slovenly, undereducated, and lecherous. Some were downright sinister; others piously refused to look women in the eye. Next to them, Pahlavi seemed dignified, well informed, and worldly. My abiding memories of the encounter were just how normal and decent he seemed, qualities that seemed precious inside Iran, where nothing was remotely decent or normal.
The country, meanwhile, was experiencing a series of convulsions. Various reform and feminist movements were pushing the regime to soften its militant foreign policy, its oppressive dress codes, and its censorship of civil society. In 2009, when an election was stolen from a reformist candidate and handed to a hard-liner, millions of people marched peacefully in the streets. In response, the regime killed dozens, and arrested and tortured many more. A young generation born after the Revolution learned that modest, internal change would never come.
The following year, a London-based television network called Manoto began broadcasting directly to Iran in Persian. The network had secured access to the vast pre-revolutionary archive of Iranian state radio and television, allowing it to produce a sophisticated stream of content—documentaries, bio-pics, concerts—that elided the authoritarian grip of the Shah’s rule and highlighted the wealth and promise of pre-revolutionary Iran. It quickly became one of the most watched channels in the country. Seven years later, Iran International, a well-funded, pro-Pahlavi news network, emerged in London. Today, it covers Pahlavi’s every move with near-reverence. “Big money went into weaponizing the Iranian population through these networks,” Nasr said. “And Reza Pahlavi was the beneficiary. They created mass nostalgia for that era and positioned him as the person who could take Iranians back there.”
One of the great challenges of the Islamic Republic was how to reconcile its Islamist project with Iran’s history. For nearly twenty-five centuries, the Persian Empire and the modern nation-state of Iran had been ruled through monarchy. The ancient idea of Iran was that of a distinct people bound together within a distinct empire, protected and led by shahs conferred with farr, a subtle concept that the Yale historian Abbas Amanat has described as “kingly charisma divinely bestowed upon a ruler of the right quality.” The king was “the shadow of God on earth,” but he could also lose his farr, if he failed to defend the kingdom or if he ruled as a tyrant.
From the start, the denigration of the Iranian monarchy was at the center of the Islamic Republic’s official ideology. Bulldozers and dynamite demolished the modernist mausoleum of Reza Shah, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. Tile work and court paintings at historical sites were vandalized, the eyes of past royals gouged out. Villains in state-produced dramas bore the names of past kings. The Revolution’s language of Islamist class struggle fixated on Iran’s recent kings as stooges of Western imperialism. (“One strand of hair on the head of a slum dweller is more honorable than a thousand hairs on the head of a palace dweller,” the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, often said.) But, in time, Khomeini and the Revolution’s other leaders ascended to the same mansions in north Tehran that they had confiscated from the élite of the Shah’s era.
Celebrating monarchy became an oblique language of protest. In the fall of 2016, thousands of people converged at Pasargadae, the ancient city containing the tomb of Cyrus the Great, near Shiraz. Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, is remembered by Iranians for his enlightened and tolerant rule. The gatherers chanted pro-monarchy slogans, including wishes of happy birthday to Pahlavi, who was born around the same day in October that Cyrus is said to have conquered Babylon. The organizers were arrested and denounced by authorities as counter-revolutionaries. In the years since, security forces have turned people away from ancient Persian burial sites on commemorative days. Qajar-dynasty kitsch—kings with walrus mustaches and embellished turbans, women with unibrows in tunics—became ubiquitous as a motif in contemporary art, on the walls of cafés, on teapots. To this day, kingship suffuses Iranian literature and mythology.
The Shah’s regime, in repressing its political opponents, had overlooked the dissident clergy and Islamists, believing that secular leftists formed its most dangerous threat; similarly, the theocracy had fixated on everyone—liberal intellectuals, reformists, labor leaders, feminist activists—except ordinary Iranians gravitating toward Reza Pahlavi. In January, when the regime realized that Pahlavi was able to mobilize Iranians inside the country, it resorted to a bloodbath. Teen-agers born thirty years after the end of his father’s reign were shot and killed for chanting his name. An estimated seven thousand people were killed (with more than eleven thousand deaths under investigation), upward of twenty-five thousand were injured, and more than fifty thousand were arrested. Security forces entered hospitals and shot injured protesters at close range. The darkest moment in Iran’s recent history brought Pahlavi into direct confrontation with the regime that had long ignored him.
The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is now the ultimate test for Pahlavi’s standing. He has called the attack “a humanitarian rescue mission,” even as the daytime sky of Tehran has been blackened out by smoke from bombings on oil facilities. A strike on the first day of the war killed at least a hundred and seventy-five people, most of them children, at a girls’ school in Minab; Pahlavi has so far not commented on the event. One of his top aides, Saeed Ghasseminejad, has identified in interviews and on social media critical oil and gas infrastructure that could be destroyed in the war. Many of those sites have since been hit. On March 10th, Iran’s police chief said, “From now on, if someone acts at the enemy’s behest, we will no longer consider them as a protester or anything of the sort but as the enemy.” His officers, he warned, “have their fingers on the trigger.” Four days later, Pahlavi called on the “Valiant Heroes of the Immortal Guard”—cells of armed loyalists inside the country—to attack the regime’s apparatus of repression, declaring that “help has arrived.”
Netanyahu and Israel’s Defense Minister, Israel Katz, have said that the bombardment of not just Iranian military sites but also security and law-enforcement targets will “create the conditions” for the Iranian people to complete the job of overthrowing the regime. But the past three weeks have made clear that air strikes alone are not likely to achieve that goal. “From Israel’s point of view, as long as Iran is weak, it doesn’t matter if it becomes a failed state or a disintegrated state,” Raz Zimmt, the director of the Iran program at the Institute for National Security Studies, in Tel Aviv, told me. Netanyahu, commenting on the absence of an organized Iranian resistance, has all but expressed such indifference. “You can lead someone to water,” he said on March 12th. “You cannot make him drink.”
Trump, when asked whether Pahlavi was an option to become the next leader of Iran, said, “I guess he is. Some people like him.” But, the President went on, “it would seem to me that somebody from within might . . . maybe would be more appropriate.” Pahlavi, in turn, has seemed to tailor his public comments for Trump’s benefit. During a recent appearance on Fox News, he warned that Iranians “are not going to settle for anything that is a remnant of this system,” and that anything less than a full transition to democracy dictated by Iranians would lead to further chaos and instability. At the same time, he has thanked the U.S. President for his “humanitarian intervention.” “Iranian society is fracturing,” Nasr told me. “The fights are not over whether you support or oppose the Islamic Republic but whether your hatred for the regime is stronger than the love of your country.” Pahlavi, he said, “has basically fallen right through that fissure.”
Pahlavi remains the most prominent figure among the various dissidents jockeying for a leadership role in a post-Islamic Republic Iran. But, despite his seemingly good intentions, the pounding of Iran’s cities, the bombing of its palaces and cultural heritage sites, the food and gas shortages, the toxic smoke-filled skies, the dead schoolchildren, and the buzz of low-flying drones overhead all risk transforming his image from the leader of a unified future to the agent of his country’s ruin. In the ancient kingship tradition, endangering the empire would cause a king to lose his farr. No monarch in two and a half millennia of Persian history has invited a foreign power to attack the land of Iran, and nowhere in the long literary tradition of royal counsel—known as andarznameh, or “mirror for princes”—has an exception been made for the cause of ending domestic tyranny. This is the current predicament of Pahlavi, whose royal charisma has never been more on the line. ♦