Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah of Iran, presents himself to Western audiences as a ready-made solution to one of the most complex political tragedies of our time. He speaks the language of democracy, human rights and national reconciliation, yet carries a surname inseparable from decades of repression, corruption, secret police terror and a monarchy that collapsed under the weight of its own arrogance. That contradiction is not a footnote to his campaign for relevance; it is the entire story.
To many Iranians, the Pahlavi name does not evoke stability or modernity but fear. It recalls SAVAK prisons, silenced journalists, looted national wealth and a ruling family insulated from the misery of ordinary citizens. The 1979 revolution did not erupt in a vacuum. It was born from the suffocating certainty that peaceful reform under the Shah was impossible. One may despise the ayatollahs with every moral fiber and still recognize that the monarchy helped pave the road to the theocracy that followed.
Yet Reza Pahlavi behaves as if history were an inconvenience, something to be edited out with polished speeches and nostalgic symbolism. From comfortable exile, he insists he represents the Iranian people, despite never having faced their scrutiny in a free election, never having organized a mass movement inside the country and never having articulated a political program beyond the vague promise that he is “not like his father.” Legitimacy, in his telling, is inherited, not earned.
More troubling is his willingness to seek foreign sponsorship as a shortcut to relevance. His public courting of Donald Trump, a president whose foreign policy oscillated between reckless threats and theatrical deals, reveals a dangerous mindset, that Iran’s future can be negotiated in hotel rooms and television studios rather than forged by Iranians themselves. For a nation whose modern history is scarred by foreign interference, coups, and externally imposed rulers, this posture is not merely tone-deaf. It is insulting.
Iranians have lived through the consequences of outsiders choosing their leaders. The 1953 coup, backed by Western intelligence services, reinstalled the Shah and extinguished a fragile democracy. It planted the seeds of the authoritarianism that later justified the Islamic Republic’s own brutality. To watch the Shah’s son now seek validation from another American strongman feels less like political strategy and more like historical farce, staged on the same bloodstained set.
Pahlavi’s defenders argue that desperation justifies any alliance, that the cruelty of the ayatollahs leaves no room for moral purity. But desperation does not excuse delusion. An opposition figure who cannot command genuine support at home has no mandate to bargain abroad. Regime change delivered by foreign blessing rarely produces freedom; more often, it breeds chaos, dependency, and new tyrannies dressed in different uniforms.
The tragedy of Iran is not the absence of saviors but the abundance of them. Every decade brings a new figure claiming exclusive authority to rescue the nation, clerics, generals, reformists, exiles, princes. Each promises unity while deepening division. Pahlavi’s self-appointment as the “only alternative” is not courage; it is a familiar authoritarian reflex, inherited more faithfully than any crown.
Meanwhile, inside Iran, millions risk prison, torture and death for small acts of defiance, removing a headscarf, organizing a strike, chanting a forbidden slogan. They do not march for a king. They march for dignity, for accountability, for the right to choose and remove their leaders without bloodshed. Their vision is messy, plural, and unresolved but it is real. Pahlavi’s vision is a silhouette projected onto foreign walls.
The Islamic Republic is brutal, incompetent and morally bankrupt. It deserves to fall. But it should fall because Iranians push it down, not because another dynasty claws its way back onto the stage with foreign applause. Trading turbans for crowns does not break the cycle of authoritarianism; it merely changes the costume.
History has already judged the father. The son now asks to be trusted as the cure to the disease that legacy helped create. Iran does not need a restored throne or a recycled surname. It needs the painful, slow construction of a republic accountable to its citizens, not to nostalgia or geopolitics.
A country is not an inheritance. It is a responsibility. And responsibility cannot be claimed by birthright, public relations campaigns, or handshakes with powerful men abroad. It can only be granted by the people who must live with the consequences.
Iran’s future must be written in Persian streets, not in English press releases, royal memoirs, or the strategic calculations of distant capitals.
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