Iranian opposition leader and son of the last shah of Iran Reza Pahlavi holds a press conference in Paris on June 23, 2025. (Joel Saget / AFP via Getty Images)

As Israeli military strikes rocked cities across Iran, Reza Pahlavi — the son of the country’s former shah — embarked upon a campaign of his own. Last week, he was invited on to media channels in Europe and the United States to proclaim that ordinary Iranians “welcomed” the bombardment of their country. Against the backdrop of air strikes, car bombs, and the frantic efforts of Tehran’s ten-million-plus residents to heed Donald Trump and Israel’s absurd evacuation orders, the erstwhile crown prince promised that a “free and flourishing” Iran lay just around the corner. Not content with these gilded platitudes, Pahlavi went on to promote what he has described as his one-hundred-day “transitional plan” for Iran in the Jerusalem Post —a newspaper whose editorial board simultaneously published a call to partition Iran into a patchwork of ethnic statelets. That Pahlavi would choose such a venue, at such a moment, speaks volumes about his purpose and the grander agendas he serves.

Pahlavi is, in every respect, the classic failson. He has never held a job, never led a serious organization, and never managed to cultivate meaningful political support among Iranians inside the country. For years, his appearances have been carefully managed within a small media bubble, usually among doting sycophants and sympathetic right-wing hosts aligned with the neoconservative project of US-led regime change. Interviewed on the Patrick Bet-David podcast, popular in the right-wing YouTube and “alternative media” sphere, Pahlavi admitted that he could only imagine returning to Iran on a part-time basis, as his social life and personal commitments were rooted in the United States, where he’s lived most of his life. It was one of few moments when Pahlavi has let the mask slip, inadvertently revealing just how distant he is from the country for which he claims to speak.

In April 2023, Pahlavi visited Israel. It was a bizarre spectacle. Hosted by the intelligence minister Gila Gamliel of the Likud Party — who would make waves later that year by publicly calling for the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza — Pahlavi toured Israel while declaring his admiration for “shared values” between Israelis and Iranians. His tone was one of obsequiousness, not diplomacy. The visit had little to do with real politics and everything to do with ingratiating himself with a state that some in the exiled monarchic opposition see as their last, desperate hope.

This was not Pahlavi’s first attempt to appeal to the Israelis for political support. His ties to Israel and its Washington allies date back to the early 1980s, when he offered Israel’s then defense minister, Ariel Sharon, a plan to oust Iran’s clerics. With the rise of the neoconservatives of the Bush administration, Pahlavi sought to renew these connections, relying on pro-Israel groups to promote his message in Washington. These groups in turn saw value in promoting an Iranian face for regime change. Despite meetings with figures like Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Moshe Katsav, Pahlavi failed to impress, his enthusiasm outweighing his political skill. His push to speak at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)’s 2003 conference was ultimately discouraged by the pro-Israel lobby’s own officials, who conveyed to the bumbling Pahlavi that he would risk alienating his Iranian American base.

The diasporic monarchist opposition has for years fantasized about returning to power on the back of foreign intervention. As a rule, they do not imagine change through mass mobilization by Iranians or internal political struggle. Instead, they wait for an imperial deus ex machina. Many of them still refuse to accept that the 1979 revolution was, in fact, a revolution. They cling to the unsubstantiated and baseless idea that the shah was brought down by a British and/or American conspiracy or that he was betrayed by a fickle and weak Carter administration. They deny that millions ever marched in the streets, that soldiers ever defected en masse, that workers across the country ever went on strike, or that an unpopular and corrupt dictatorship was, indeed, overthrown by a popular mass movement. Instead, they claim the shah had simply grown “too powerful” and had to be removed by the West. These conspiracies began with the deposed Mohammad Reza Shah himself, who once famously quipped that “if you lift up Khomeini’s beard, you will find ‘Made in England’ written under his chin.” These claims are not only ahistorical but also deny the agency and struggles of millions of Iranians, as well as the diverse social forces that participated in a revolution of world-historical significance.

Given their antipathy toward mass politics, it is not surprising that monarchists are now at odds with the same civil society groups and democratic activists in Iran — including labor organizers, the Iranian Writers’ Association, religious intellectuals, erstwhile regime loyalists, and prominent political prisoners — who have paid most dearly in the fight for civil and democratic rights. In recent days, many of these figures — among the Islamic Republic’s most prominent critics — have spoken out against the Israeli and US-led aggression, in some cases from within the very prisons that Pahlavi now claims bombs will liberate.

That such baseless historical conspiracies still circulate as monarchist common sense is telling. It speaks to a deep-seated fear of mass politics and democratic possibility, as well as an enduring reverence for imperial power and the violence that it projects across the globe. In their eyes, only Western powers have the agency to make or unmake regimes. One can be sympathetic to this view to a point: after all, Britain did help elevate and then dethrone the first Pahlavi king in the first half of the twentieth century, and in 1953 the United States and Britain overthrew a popular prime minister, putting the Pahlavis back in power. And so, current-day monarchists reason, why can’t the Americans simply place Reza Pahlavi and his coterie on the throne? A few bombs will drop, the Americans will snap their mighty fingers, and Iran can go back to the way things were. This is why so many of them now openly advocate for war against their own country, despite the cataclysmic human toll such a war will surely bring about. Pahlavi and his ilk exhibit stunningly little awareness of the ongoing US-made catastrophes to Iran’s immediate west and east in Iraq and Afghanistan — not to mention the thoroughly discredited effort to put pliant yes-men like Ahmad Chalabi in power in Iraq.

This is also why Reza Pahlavi has routinely advocated for the United States to “stop appeasing” the Islamic Republic, to impose crippling sanctions, and to proceed with the neocon fever dream of a war for regime change. Despite Pahlavi’s hollow claims to the contrary, his aim is the restoration of the dynastic absolutism once wielded by his father and today exemplified by Iran’s neighbors (and the US’s allies) in the Gulf, not a genuine commitment to democratic self-governance. His father consistently disregarded Iran’s constitution, which was designed to limit monarchical power and ensure that the shah would reign, not rule. Instead, the shah established a one-party state and ruthless security apparatus with American and Israeli training and support.

Today’s monarchists vacillate between championing and minimizing these unsavory aspects of Pahlavi history. In 2023, Parviz Sabeti — former head of the notorious Third Division of the shah’s intelligence service, which was responsible for torturing and executing dissidents — made a rare public appearance at a protest in the United States sparked by the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement. Monarchists seized the opportunity to co-opt the demonstrations and hailed Iran’s former torturer in chief as a “living legend.” At a rally in Munich, they carried posters of Sabeti’s image alongside messages promising that he would be “the nightmare of future terrorists” in a reestablished monarchic Iran. Not long after, the diasporic television network Manoto TV — closely allied with monarchists and long believed to be funded by foreign sources — aired a multipart documentary on Sabeti whitewashing the legacy of torture and extrajudicial killings that he represents.

Ironically, in aligning themselves with the very countries now attacking Iran, exiled monarchists are retracing the steps of one of their oldest political adversaries: the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK). Once advocates of an eclectic blend of Shiite Islamic radicalism, Marxism-Leninism, and armed struggle, the MEK has since degenerated into a personality cult and mercenary outfit, conveniently relocated to Albania after the US-led invasion of Iraq. It is widely believed to collaborate closely with hostile intelligence services, engaging in cyberwarfare, disinformation campaigns, and covert operations inside Iran. During the grueling eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War, launched in 1980 by Saddam Hussein, the exiled Mojahedin made the decision to fight alongside Iraq against their own countrymen. This decision, undertaken by the MEK’s then leader Massoud Rajavi, proved ruinous for the group and disastrous to the Iranian opposition still inside the country. The Mojahedin’s popularity cratered and has never recovered. It maintains high-profile ties to a rogue’s gallery of American neoconservatives including Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and Rudy Giuliani, who regularly speak at its annual conference, but inspires little other than revulsion from Iranians across the political and social spectrum.

While the close relationship Pahlavi has formed with Israel under Netanyahu is surely a marriage of convenience, it is also undergirded by meaningful ideological synergy. The ideology underpinning monarchist politics today is a toxic blend of racial chauvinism and colonial self-loathing, nostalgia for imperial grandeur, and authoritarian nationalism. Monarchists often portray Iran as a fundamentally Persian and Aryan state, ignoring or denigrating the country’s rich tapestry of ethnic and linguistic diversity. This claim to Aryanness also ignores the obvious elephant in the room: that full-throated claims of pure “Aryanness” have not otherwise been made in polite company since World War II, for what should be glaringly obvious reasons. Iranian “Aryanism” is grounded in a crude ethnic nationalism that fantasizes about a purified national identity — a legacy of nationalist tropes popularized under the first Pahlavi king, Reza Shah.

In this sense, their worldview overlaps neatly with that of Zionist settler colonialism and the Israeli far right, which also fixates on the biopolitics of demographic control and ethno-racial homogeneity. This explains why the prerevolutionary lion-and-sun flag has become a fixture at counterprotests to Palestinian solidarity rallies — even when the protesters themselves make no mention of Iran — and why far-right Iranian American vigilantes are among those who violently attacked anti-genocide student protesters on US campuses in 2024. The synergy between these movements is not simply born of shared anti–Islamic Republic sentiment, let alone concern for Iran’s would-be nuclear program. It is a political alignment with a fundamentally ethnonationalist vision of regional order, one that conveniently acts as a willing subcontractor of US power and its projection across the region.

This convergence has created fertile ground for the Israeli hasbara propaganda machine. Monarchist influencers and media personalities frequently parrot Israeli talking points, casting Iran as the principal threat to regional and even world peace, all while Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians and its intermittent bombing of Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen grind on unabated. In return, Israeli political figures indulge the monarchists’ delusions of future relevance.

Yet the most recent Israeli aggression has exposed the fragility of this alliance. Among Iranians, including many deeply disillusioned with the Islamic Republic, the air strikes have largely been viewed not as blows against the regime but an attack on the country, its civilians, and its territorial integrity. Iran experts have noted the “rally around the flag” effect that bombardment has had among Iranians; this phenomenon might be better understood as a “rally around the homeland” effect. Even staunch critics of the Islamic Republic understand the distinction between opposition to the regime and endorsement of foreign aggression undertaken by those who wish to carve up the country or destroy its very ability to function as an effective state with all that entails. The idea that Israeli bombs could usher in democracy in Iran is not only fantastical — it is also profoundly insulting to those in the country who have for decades fought for a better future against the tide of sanctions, war, and political repression.

The truth is, the monarchist project is craven and empty and has been for some time. It has failed to attract the young in large numbers; failed to build coalitions across Iran’s ethnic, religious, class, and political lines; and failed to present any hint of a credible political program. Its leader is chosen by bloodline, not through any achievements of his own making, let alone through democratic deliberation. Most of its famous advocates have been outside of Iran for years and even decades and as such have no meaningful ties to contemporary Iranian civil society. Its internal culture is one of paranoia, misogyny, and authoritarianism, with supporters resorting to rape and death threats against anyone, including journalists and scholars, with whom they disagree. It lacks a coherent social base and depends on a media sphere and online bot army seemingly bankrolled by foreign powers with agendas of their own. Its claim to legitimacy rests entirely on retrograde nostalgia for a past that never existed — at least not for the overwhelming majority of Iranians — and stilted Orientalist fantasies of an idealized Iran “before the mullahs.” Reza Pahlavi is above all an avatar of these myriad failures.

If Iran is to have a democratic and sovereign future, it will not come from monarchist nostalgia or Israeli and US military intervention. It will come from the hard work of collective political struggle, shaped by those who live in Iran and are willing to fight for a better future without selling their country’s dignity. There is no shortcut to liberation through warplanes or dusty royal titles. With Israeli bombs falling across Iran and the Trump administration’s unlawful military assault against Iran’s nuclear program, a truly free and flourishing Iran feels further away than ever. It is only with the cessation of wanton military aggression that Iranians might be afforded the possibility of endeavoring to someday forge their own futures.

Golnar Nikpour Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi