By effectively designating Reza Pahlavi as Iran’s leader-in-waiting, Western media may be squelching a genuine opportunity for regime collapse and a democratic future.

Iran is once again experiencing sustained unrest reflecting something much more powerful than a political or ideological disagreement. Month after month, the people have endured deepening economic deprivation and political suffocation. The ruling clerics, led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seem unable or unwilling to provide relief even as they continue building weaponry and underwriting foreign proxy militias. Reports indicate that Iraqi Shia militias funded by the Tehran regime have been brought into Iran to help suppress the uprising.

When shopkeepers shut their doors, students flood campuses, and families chant in the streets knowing they may be arrested or even killed, they are not just taking a day or two off to march for a virtuous cause: they are signaling something far more consequential, namely that the Islamic Republic’s capacity to provide for Iran’s citizens has collapsed. After 47 years of diverting energy revenues and holding back the vast potential of over 90 million Iranians, this regime’s days may be numbered.

As the uprising grows, a parallel contest emerges—one that Iranians know all too well from experience. It is the struggle over the narrative of the protest: how to explain what has caused the population to revolt, who is seen as speaking for the people, and who gets anointed as “the alternative” and marketed abroad as the anticipated successor. This is where history demands sobriety. Revolutions don’t fail only because dictators suppress them. They can also be derailed when outsiders, especially exiled figures, grab the media spotlight and turn a widely supported quest for guaranteed political agency by citizens into a one-person self-promotion exercise.

The Old Trap: A Broad Revolt, Repackaged as One Man’s Destiny

In 1979, Iranians from across the political spectrum rose up against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s brutal and corrupt dictatorship with aspirations of constitutional governance, social justice, and freedom of belief. Educated, productive Iranians—including many men and women who believed their Muslim faith was fully consistent with political rights—expected to live under a participatory government whose legitimacy was rooted in free and fair elections. The Iranian Revolution was a political, not religious, phenomenon, and did not form a theocratic mandate.

But once the uprising’s momentum peaked, a long-exiled figure—his profile enhanced by the wide dissemination of cassette recordings—returned as the supposed embodiment of the revolution. The diversity of interests within the anti-monarchy coalition rapidly narrowed to a single source of authority, as the ambitious Ayatollah Khomeini pressed politicians to accept his totalitarian constitution, anointing him as supreme leader. The result was a new monopoly over politics, law, and violence, secured by force rather than popular consent, under the banner of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

When legitimacy is vested in a single personality, a revolution becomes vulnerable to hijacking. Once captured, whether by clerics in turbans or courtiers around a crown, the exertions of a popular revolt tend to produce the same unsatisfactory outcome: the suppression of political dissent, the weakening of institutions, reliance on repressive state enforcement, and the rise of private entitlement at the expense of popular sovereignty.

How Media Narratives Can Distort Iran’s Democratic Transition

Today, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah, who fled Iran with his family as a teenager in 1978, is trying to promote himself as the face of Iran’s transition. Through high-profile media appearances, op-eds, and an international messaging strategy, Pahlavi is cultivating the impression that the Iranian opposition is coalescing around his leadership. Online campaigns aggressively frame him as the ready-made “representative” of the uprising, implying the existence of a popular mandate. 

In his interviews, Mr. Pahlavi avoids the key foundational questions about his potential governing capacity: mandate, organization, and support inside Iran. For 47 years, he has lived in relative obscurity in the United States. Indeed, a few years ago, he said that not only his family and friends, but everyone he knows is in the United States: “Honestly, my life has been for the past forty years here in America…If I was to go back [to Iran], what do I go back to?”

Pahlavi does not possess a forceful record of opposition to the clerical regime, and cannot claim any representation or organized support inside Iran. In recent days, he has said he opposes foreign invasion, which is always a welcome stance. Yet he promptly contradicted himself by publicly calling on President Donald Trump to “intervene” on behalf of Iranian protestors.

The harder test is legitimacy. How does Mr. Pahlavi propose to gain a mandate from the people of Iran? Diaspora hashtags, online petitions, and media interviews are in no way indicative of support by a repressed population demanding change. Mr. Pahlavi’s media operation has been caught in recent days dubbing pro-monarchist slogans onto videos of demonstrations, falsely claiming popular support from protesters who clearly oppose him, and attributing the same clip to multiple locations.

When he cites defections, elite fractures, or “networks inside Iran,” clear evidence for such claims is lacking, and they cannot be readily corroborated. More tellingly, Mr. Pahlavi is vague about the critical issue of how a transition to self-government will occur. Who selects a transitional council, and by what process? How are women and Iran’s diverse communities guaranteed enforceable power rather than symbolic promises? What guardrails, such as term limits, separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and civilian control of security forces, will prevent swapping one personalized rule for another, as happened after 1979?

Coalition-building can be measured, and Mr. Pahlavi has a consistent track record. The Georgetown-linked unity effort in 2023 that produced the “Mahsa Charter” quickly unraveled; other notable dissidents who appeared with Pahlavi at the Munich Security Conference that year soon parted ways with him. His earlier National Council of Iran (launched in 2013) likewise withered. If the coalition-building efforts of the crown prince have failed in the safety of exile, one must be realistic about his capacity to inspire and lead regime opponents, courting harsh repression inside Iran.

This moment of potential revolutionary upheaval requires reckoning with history: a clear repudiation of the authoritarian legacy of the Pahlavi era and the clerical dictatorship, and an embrace of truth-telling, accountability, democratic participation, and guaranteed rights.

There is a serious risk that attributing illusory legitimacy to an individual promising an outcome he has no credible means of delivering will fracture the Iranian people, undermining shared democratic goals with his inevitable failure to deliver, and resulting in debilitating personality warfare. External actors, such as media, foreign governments, and sponsors, will only weaken the prospects for democratic change if they begin treating the exiled Pahlavi as “the” solution, sidelining the messy but necessary work of building a broad national coalition and democratic infrastructure.

Iran has already paid an unbearable price for this kind of shortcut.

What Iranians Are Actually Fighting For: Popular Sovereignty, Not Idols

The uprising’s most important demand is not the restoration of any past era. It is the end of any form of authoritarian rule and the establishment of popular sovereignty—the right of Iranian citizens to participate in choosing their political future without coercion, clerical vetting, secret police terror, or hereditary entitlement.

A credible democratic transition requires, at a minimum: the separation of religion and state; equal rights for women in law and practice, including in property ownership, marriage, and divorce; protection for religious and ethnic minorities; an independent judiciary with guaranteed due process; the freedom of expression, assembly, and association; the abolition of torture, the death penalty, and political prosecutions; a clear timetable for free elections under international standards; security sector accountability, including the dismantling of the IRGC’s political machinery, its propaganda operations, and its mafia-like economic empire.

A bipartisan majority in the US House of Representatives agrees, with 226 Members having co-sponsored H.Res. 166, which “calls for supporting the Iranian opposition and the Ten-Point Plan for the Future of Iran, which aligns with democratic values and ensures a democratic, secular, peaceful, and non-nuclear republic for the future of Iran.”

This is the difference between a hijacked revolution that merely replaces rulers and a true revolution that replaces the rules.

What the International Community and Media Should Do—and Stop Doing

If political leaders and correspondents around the world genuinely want to support Iran’s people, they must stop acting like the possibility of regime collapse is a casting call. Here are practical steps that can help the people inside Iran rather than unwittingly benefiting the regime by elevating opportunists outside Iran:

Stop trying to anoint “the leader.” Pay attention to voices inside Iran; hear the workers, students, women, human rights defenders, and families of victims, rather than defaulting to social media self-promoters like Reza Pahlavi. 

Support internet freedom and anti-censorship tools. This can ensure that internal organizing is driven by Iranians, not curated abroad or fabricated in regime media cells.

Target the machinery of repression. Without the IRGC, intelligence units, prison networks, and economic fronts that fund brutality, the Supreme Leader could not remain in power.

Advance accountability. Through international investigations, the world can recognize the regime’s horrific dossier of atrocity crimes and terrorism, many successfully concealed by the regime and rarely, if ever, mentioned by Western “Iran-watchers” and correspondents. It is never too late for appropriate sanctions on those responsible, including through the assertion of universal jurisdiction where possible.

Refuse false stability bargains. These trade human rights for short-term diplomatic convenience. By now, no one can deny that Western leaders’ perennial search for reform and moderation has only extended the regime’s reign of repression at home and fuelled conflicts abroad.

The Bottom Line: Iran’s Revolution Belongs to the People

As early as 1906, the Iranian people were prepared to rise up and establish constitutional democracy, only to be thwarted by elites and external powers. Shah Reza Pahlavi, the grandfather of Reza Pahlavi, captured Tehran with a Cossack brigade in 1921 and anointed himself Shah in 1925. The US-led coup in 1953 that deposed Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and solidified Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s hold on the Peacock Throne ensured another quarter-century of despotic one-man rule.

Forty-seven years ago, a broad-based revolution drove the corrupt, dictatorial monarch from power, only to see the nation’s quest for self-government hijacked by a diabolically power-hungry Ayatollah. Iranians have sacrificed for decades, awaiting a new opportunity to realize the aspirations of the 1979 revolution. That day will come soon. 

Iran does not need another “savior,” and this uprising is much more than a public-relations opportunity. It is a national struggle for dignity and opportunity within a democratic republic in which the people’s sovereign rights can never again be subjugated to unaccountable rule in any form.

When the clerics fall from power, Iran will need a verifiable, transparent process that leads to a democratic republic. The recurring chant in protests across Iran could not be clearer: “No to dictatorship, be it crown or turban.” A democratic, secular republic built on stable and equitable institutions and committed to principles is the non-negotiable requirement for Iran. It has already been paid for by the Iranian people in over a century of struggle and decline under both monarchy and theocracy.

About the Authors: Ramesh Sepehrrad and Lincoln Bloomfield

Ramesh Sepehrrad, PhD, is a published author and scholar-practitioner specializing in security, technology, and conflict resolution, with executive leadership experience across both the public and private sectors. She serves in advisory, founding, and board roles for nonprofit organizations focused on Iran’s human rights, democratic change, and women’s leadership.

Lincoln Bloomfield Jr. is a former US assistant secretary of state for Political-Military Affairs with extensive experience in international security. He has held senior appointed policy positions at the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House and chaired the Stimson Center. He continues to write and advise on US foreign policy and global security issues.

Image: Konstantin Shishkin / Shutterstock.com.

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