POLITICS: Reza Pahlavi — the man who could have been Shah

Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi – the son of the last Shah of Iran and heir to the Peacock Throne – hasn’t been home in 45 years. Neither has his wife, Yasmine.

Their three daughters, raised in the suburbs of Washington, DC, have never set foot in their ancestral homeland. 

Now 63, Pahlavi left Iran at age 17 for military school in the United States just before his cancer-stricken father, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, relinquished the throne on Jan. 16, 1979.

The Shah’s departure left behind a leadership vacuum filled by Ruhollah Khomeini, which catalyzed Iran’s transformation into the conservative theocracy cut off from the Western world that we now know today.

Since that time, Pahlavi, who studied the nonviolent philosophies of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, has remained transfixed on one goal: igniting a revolution that replaces the brutal regime now governing Iran with a secular democracy chosen by and for the Iranian people.

“The Islamic regime is the root cause of the problems we see in the region, whether it’s terrorism, radicalism or the nuclear proliferation threat,” Pahlavi recently told The Post. “It’s in the ayatollahs’ DNA to be an enemy to modernization and progress. Look at what Dubai is today compared to 40 years ago,” he continues. “Instead of becoming the next Japan, Iran has become the next North Korea.” 

Pahlavi’s words come months into the Hamas war with Israel — a conflict with deep roots in Tehran’s commitment to exporting extremism far beyond its borders.

The mullahs’ support of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) has been extensively chronicled, and recent reporting showed that Iran has also been smuggling arms to the West Bank to foment further unrest in Israel. 

Such ambitions — along with Iran’s increasing closeness with Russia and China — help explain Pahlavi’s belief that Western governments should stop engaging in futile diplomacy with the Islamic Republic and focus more on empowering Iranians directly.

“Iranian people represent the true agents of change,” he said. “We should be investing in them, not paying the regime more money to continue . . . financing their proxies.” 

When the US is weak in its foreign policy, Tehran is emboldened to sow chaos at home and abroad, Pahlavi continues.

Executions in Iran, the regime’s military spend and its nuclear weapons advancement have all increased significantly as administrations under Obama and Biden appeased, rather than challenged, the regime, according to the National Union for Democracy in Iran. 

“The premise of dealing with the regime in terms of negotiation and diplomacy is based on the false expectation of behavior change,” Pahlavi said, adding that the Hamas attack on Israel occurred, in part, because Tehran was emboldened by weakness out of Washington, such as Biden’s back-door deal last year to transfer $6 billion to Iran in exchange for five US prisoners.  

Pahlavi’s supporters, consisting of secularists, constitutional monarchists and liberal democrats, laud him as the man who should have been Shah.

For them, he is an assiduous statesman who last year represented the Iranian people’s democratic aspirations in official visits to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, the Munich Security Conference and Israel.

Although Israel and Iran remain locked in a shadow war edging precipitously closer toward nuclear brinkmanship — particularly after an Israeli strike in Damascus in early April killed senior Iranian military commanders — Pahlavi envisages the unthinkable: a Cyrus Accords between Israel and a post-Ayatollah Iran.

Although still a dream, it would be modeled on both the existing Abraham Accords between Israel and Gulf states, as well as the decades of close trade and military partnerships both countries enjoyed before the revolution. 

Pahlavi imagines a NATO-like intergovernmental alliance that advances peace, not war.

“Imagine a region where Iran, Israel, Saudi and the UAE redirect money allocated to defense and security to education and healthcare,” he explains. 

But regional instability has instead dominated Tehran’s foreign policy agenda.

Hamas’ abduction of 253 mostly Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 relied on a strategy emanating from Tehran, whose leaders pioneered captive diplomacy with the 444-day US embassy hostage crisis in 1979.

The Islamic Republic has since leveraged hostage taking as a winning strategy to coax the U.S. and allies into those prisoner swaps and financial rewards.

“When you reward hostage taking by paying a ransom, what do you expect? More hostages,” Pahlavi says. 

The Hamas attacks in October were also timed to “sabotage” momentum toward a landmark, U.S.-brokered Israeli-Saudi peace agreement. Such a Sunni-Israeli alliance would have threatened Shia-majority Iran’s regional ambitions, as the U.S. rewarded Riyadh with advanced weapons and military technology in exchange for recognizing Jerusalem. 

As Pahlavi explains, his grand plan for the downfall of the Islamic Republic is multi-fold: First apply “maximum pressure” on the regime through harsher sanctions on senior government and military officials — along with formal terrorist designations for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) by the UK and EU.

Then provide “maximum support” for the Iranian people, who have staged several unsuccessful attempts in recent years to unseat the Islamic Republic. 

In 2009, for instance, millions of Iranians disputed the presidential re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Then, from 2017-2019, desperate Iranians protested over water scarcity, economic hardship and political repression. 

But no movement posed as existential a threat to the Islamic Republic as the uprising in September 2022, sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini after she was arrested for failing to wear her hijab appropriately.

Although the movement gained worldwide attention, it faded out after mere months with little material impact on the regime.

Opposition leadership in the Iranian diaspora unraveled abroad while Iran’s security forces launched a violent campaign of arrests and executions at home.

More than 537 protesters were killed and and at least 20,000 were arrested.

The slaughter continued into 2023, which saw 853 executions across Iran, the highest number on record since 2015.

Such numbers, while sobering, have mostly gone unreported.

“There’s always less media attention on Iranian people’s causes than others,” Pahlavi said, referring to the Israel-Palestine conflict and Ukraine war.

Part of the problem is the White House — where “the Biden administration [has] neglected to take concrete actions to support the Iranian people, who are in a David-versus-Goliath battle,” he says. “Goliath spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually on PR while also restricting Internet access to its people to communicate among themselves and with the outside world.” 

Still, Pahlavi remains undeterred as revolutionary fervor persists within Iran.

The parliamentary elections this past March, for instance, tested the regime’s long-term legitimacy as voter turnout sunk to historic lows. “We don’t need foreign countries to intervene to remove the regime,” he said. “Iranians demand change and are paying with their lives every day.”

As for what role he might play in Iran should the theocracy collapse, Pahlavi remains vague. “I’m not running for any office or position,” he notes. “For me, the finish line is the day people go to the polls and finally participate in a referendum to decide their fate.” 

In the meantime Pahlavi relies on his modest secretariat, or cabinet-in-exile, consisting of a handful of close political and media advisors that run his schedule and accompany him to speaking engagements.  

Pahlavi, of course, has his detractors.

As the son of Iran’s last authoritarian monarch overthrown in a bloody revolution, many view him as lacking any real meaningful influence.

As Thomas Juneau, assistant professor at the University of Ottowa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs has written on X, Pahlavi is surrounded by “close advisors [who] are toxic, far-right individuals who cause major damage to the opposition in exile (and so help the Islamic Republic).”

“A cult of personality has grown around Reza Pahlavi which portrays him as a man he is not and never can be,” added Alireza Nader, an Iran scholar and former Rand policy analyst.

“According to this cult, Pahlavi alone can save Iran from the Islamic Republic. No other political figure matters, and if anyone challenges or criticizes Pahlavi, he or she is called a traitor.”

Still, no opposition figure comes close to Pahlavi’s support inside Iran and abroad.

A recent survey by the Empirical Research and Forecasting Institute found that 79.9% of Iranians opted for Pahlavi as their favored leader over current rulers or alternative opposition figures.

Iranians are also increasingly looking to secularize their country, with a government survey leaked to BBC Persian showing support for a demarcation between religion and state climbing from 31% in 2015 to 74% today. 

A key factor of Pahlavi’s popularity is his consistent, decades-long vision for a secular and democratic Iran that adheres to nationalist sentiments already rising in the country, says Saeed Ghasseminejad, senior Iran advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“The only alternative to the Islamic Republic’s radical Islamism that can mobilize the masses is nationalism,” Ghasseminejad said. “The three waves of widespread protests over the last six years all had strong nationalist tendencies. The crown prince, because of his position, name, and background, is naturally perceived as the leader of this return to Iran’s national identity.”

For Pahlavi, his “patriotic duty” and mission for the past 40 years have been to place Iran’s democratic transition directly in the hands of its people. “My role is to ensure we have an interim government that prepares the stage for the elections where these debates about Iran’s future and what ultimately people want takes place.” 

Jonathan Harounoff is the author of the forthcoming book “Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomenLifeFreedom Revolt.”