Sanctions are typically presented as instruments of coercive diplomacy — tools intended to alter state conduct without resorting to armed conflict. Yet mounting evidence suggests that sanctions often function less as isolated policy instruments and more as components of broader coercive strategies. In practice, they can operate as forms of economic warfare, imposing severe civilian hardship while political elites adapt and endure. Their effects frequently extend far beyond governing structures, reshaping currency stability, trade access, and basic living conditions for ordinary populations.

This raises deeper questions about their role in international affairs. Are sanctions genuinely alternatives to conflict, or do they sometimes constitute a preliminary phase within escalating pressure campaigns? Do they meaningfully compel political change, or merely redistribute economic pain? And when sanctions fail to produce the anticipated outcomes, what pressures emerge for policymakers to pursue more direct forms of intervention?

From Iraq in the 1990s to Iran today, and even in the dramatic case of Venezuela this year, historical experience shows that sanctions rarely deliver straightforward political outcomes. Instead, they have often generated profound humanitarian consequences, uncertain strategic gains, and, in some cases, dynamics that coincide with escalation rather than resolution.

Sanctions and Civilian Harm: A Form of Collective Punishment?

Economic sanctions are commonly defined as the withdrawal of customary trade and financial relations for foreign policy and security objectives. They can range from comprehensive trade embargoes to targeted asset freezes and travel bans, and typically seek to constrain a government’s economic capacity by restricting revenue streams, financial access, and external trade.

Yet the mechanisms through which sanctions operate - restricted access to foreign exchange, disrupted trade flows, blocked investment, and severed banking relationships - inevitably transmit economic shocks beyond governing institutions. When a country’s currency plummets, inflation soars, and import costs spike, the effects are felt widely in markets, clinics, and households. A substantial body of research suggests that civilian populations often bear disproportionate costs, including declines in national income, higher poverty rates, food insecurity, reduced access to medicines and basic healthcare, and even increased mortality. These outcomes have led some scholars to question whether broad sanctions regimes resemble forms of collective punishment rather than precisely targeted diplomatic tools.

Proponents of sanctions, particularly Western governments, maintain that such measures are directed at state institutions rather than civilian populations and typically include humanitarian exemptions designed to mitigate unintended harm. Yet real-world experience frequently demonstrates that when financial networks, banking channels, and trade flows are severely constrained, exemptions alone may not prevent broader economic dislocation.

Modern Case Studies - Iraq, Iran, Cuba…

Iraq:

One of the most frequently cited examples of broad sanctions regimes is Iraq following its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. In response, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 661 (1990), imposing sweeping economic sanctions that prohibited most international trade and financial transactions with Iraq. These measures, maintained throughout the 1990s, severely restricted Iraq’s ability to import goods, including items classified as dual-use, while dramatically constraining government revenues.

Although humanitarian exemptions formally existed, the scale and rigidity of the sanctions regime contributed to extensive economic dislocation. Iraq’s infrastructure, already weakened by conflict, deteriorated further under constraints on spare parts, industrial inputs, and foreign exchange access. Over time, international organisations and humanitarian observers reported rising malnutrition, shortages of essential medicines, degradation of water-treatment systems, and significant declines in public health indicators. The Iraqi case became emblematic of the unintended civilian consequences that can accompany comprehensive sanctions, particularly when economic restrictions interact with fragile state capacity and post-war reconstruction challenges.

Iran:

Iran’s economy has been shaped by decades of sanctions targeting oil exports, banking, and foreign investment. The case of Iran illustrates how sanctions’ mechanics create real economic distress. In early 2026, United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly described how Washington’s sanctions strategy created a “dollar shortage” in Iran - restricting oil export revenues and access to international financial markets - which contributed to the collapse of the Iranian currency, surging inflation, and consequent public protests in December 2025.

Bessent’s remarks illustrate how contemporary sanctions strategies deliberately target foreign exchange access and financial flows, generating macroeconomic effects that extend beyond state institutions. Although humanitarian exemptions formally exist, banking and trade restrictions frequently impede the entry of essential goods.

This pattern undermines the idea that sanctions cleanly separate governments from their people. In practice, economic suffering spreads widely across society - from small business owners unable to import parts, to families struggling with food costs and medicine shortages - even if elites maintain access to privileged channels.

Cuba:

The United States’ embargo on Cuba, initiated in the early 1960s following the 1959 Cuban Revolution, represents one of the longest-running sanctions regimes in modern history. Originally framed within the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War, the embargo restricted trade, financial relations, and investment flows between the United States and Cuba, with various modifications over subsequent decades. While the policy’s stated objectives evolved, its core restrictions have remained largely intact.

Over time, scholars and international observers have debated the embargo’s effectiveness and humanitarian implications. Critics argue that prolonged restrictions have contributed to chronic shortages, limited access to certain technologies and medical supplies, and constrained economic development, while the Cuban political system itself persisted. The Cuban case is frequently invoked in discussions of sanctions durability and path dependence, illustrating how long-standing economic isolation can become structurally embedded without producing decisive political transformation. United Nations bodies and human rights experts have repeatedly called for reassessment of the embargo’s humanitarian consequences, underscoring broader tensions between coercive policy objectives and civilian welfare.

Recent developments have provided a contemporary illustration of these structural pressures. Severe fuel shortages, transport disruptions, and recurring electricity blackouts have highlighted the vulnerabilities of an economy operating under prolonged external constraints and limited access to global markets. Although such crises are shaped by multiple factors, they underscore a recurring feature of sanctions environments: systemic economic pressures frequently manifest through civilian infrastructure and everyday life rather than immediate political transformation.

Can Sanctions Force Regime Change? The Mixed Evidence

A central claim in favour of sanctions is that they will compel governments to change policy or collapse under economic strain. Yet the historical record is mixed at best:

Iraq (1990s):

Sanctions did not topple Saddam Hussein initially. Instead they inflicted long-term suffering on the civilian population and weakened basic services without delivering decisive political outcomes.

Iran (1979–present):

Decades of sanctions have pressured Tehran’s economy, but the political system currently remains intact. Economic hardship has not translated into predictable regime transformation, as elites have largely insulated themselves from economic pain whilst ordinary Iranians bear disproportionate costs, and protests have often focused as much on domestic grievances as on external pressure. Sanctions policy is now also being accompanied by overt military signalling including the recent deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln to the region and indications that additional naval assets could follow, highlighting how economic pressure often coexists with the latent threat of force when political objectives remain unmet.

Cuba (1960s–present):

The United States’ long-standing embargo on Cuba, initiated in the early 1960s, represents one of the most enduring sanctions regimes in modern history. While designed to weaken the revolutionary government, the Cuban political system persisted. Notably, the sanctions regime coincided with the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, an attempted military intervention that failed to remove the leadership. The episode illustrates how economic pressure strategies may coexist with escalation dynamics without guaranteeing political change.

Venezuela (2005-present):

United States sanctions imposed targeted Venezuela’s oil sector, financial networks, and state-linked entities, constraining government revenue and external financing channels. In January 2026, the United States moved beyond economic measures and conducted a military operation resulting in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his transfer to the United States to face criminal charges. The operation triggered immediate legal and diplomatic controversy, with critics citing tensions with Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter, which prohibits the use of force absent Security Council authorisation or self-defence justification.

This recurring dynamic exposes a central paradox of sanctions policy. Measures designed to coerce political elites frequently transmit their harshest effects to civilian populations, while governing structures adapt and endure. When sanctions fail to generate the anticipated political concessions or regime change, policymakers face a narrowing spectrum of options, creating pressures that may coincide with or be followed by escalation toward more direct forms of intervention. In this way, sanctions often operate not as isolated instruments but as components within broader coercive strategies, blurring the conceptual boundary between economic statecraft and more overt forms of force. The consequence can be a cycle in which civilians first absorb the economic shock of sanctions and later the instability and disruption associated with kinetic measures - a dual burden that challenges the characterisation of sanctions as a purely humanitarian or low-cost alternative to war.

Rethinking sanctions – Alternatives and Consequences

If the objective of sanctions is genuinely to promote human rights, political reform, and international stability, then their humanitarian externalities cannot be treated as incidental. Policymakers may therefore need to place greater emphasis on instruments that apply pressure without amplifying civilian vulnerability. These may include sustained diplomatic engagement, negotiated settlements, multilateral legal mechanisms, and targeted accountability measures directed at specific individuals or entities rather than entire economies. Conflict-management frameworks and economic integration strategies may, in certain contexts, provide more durable pathways to behavioural change than broad economic isolation.

Sanctions retain significant appeal as instruments of statecraft. Targeted sanctions - particularly those directed at individuals accused of corruption, proliferation, or human rights abuses - may serve signalling and deterrent functions in certain contexts. The sanctions regime against apartheid-era South Africa is frequently cited as contributing to political transition, though scholars continue to debate the relative weight of sanctions alongside internal resistance, economic pressures, and geopolitical change.

However, the record of broad economic sanctions aimed at entire economies is far more complex. Whilst capable of imposing significant economic constraints, their effects frequently diffuse across civilian populations whilst political elites adapt and endure. Their capacity to compel regime change is uncertain, and prolonged use can entrench rather than resolve geopolitical tensions. A more discriminating approach to economic coercion - one that rigorously weighs humanitarian costs alongside strategic aims - may therefore be essential if sanctions are to retain both legitimacy and effectiveness within the international system.

If sanctions are to retain legitimacy as credible alternatives to armed conflict, their humanitarian consequences and strategic limitations must remain central, not peripheral, to foreign-policy design.

Constitutional Iran Before the Coup

Iran was not a political blank slate in the early twentieth century. Under the Qajar dynasty, the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, followed by the Supplementary Fundamental Laws of 1907, produced Iran’s first written constitution and established the Majles, or parliament. These reforms emerged from a broad coalition of merchants, clerics, intellectuals, and reformers who sought to limit royal power, establish rule of law, and restrain arbitrary authority.

Although imperfectly implemented and frequently undermined, Iran’s constitutional experiment mattered. It embedded the idea that sovereignty could be constrained, that law could and should stand above the crown, and that political legitimacy should be derived from consent rather than force. This tradition would resurface repeatedly and be repeatedly suppressed.

The Rise of the Pahlavi Monarchy

The Pahlavi dynasty did not arise from ancient lineage or dynastic continuity. Reza Khan, a military officer, seized power through force in the early 1920s before crowning himself Shah in 1925. His adoption of the dynastic name “Pahlavi” was itself an act of political construction: a reference to Middle Persian, the language of pre-Islamic Iran, chosen deliberately to evoke imperial grandeur and historical depth.

In reality, the dynasty was modern and improvised, not ancient. It rested on coercion, symbolism, and state power rather than inherited legitimacy. This matters, because contemporary monarchist narratives often present the Pahlavis as heirs to an unbroken tradition stretching back to Cyrus the Great - a myth that collapses under even minimal historical scrutiny.

Reza Shah’s rule ended abruptly during the Second World War. Alarmed by his close alignment with Nazi Germany, British and Soviet forces occupied Iran in 1941 and forced his abdication. His son, Mohammad Reza Shah, only twenty-one years old, was installed on the throne, inheriting a fragile monarchy whose survival was already depending on foreign approval rather than domestic consensus, sowing the seeds of a legitimacy crisis that would deepen over time.

Mossadegh and the Democratic Path Not Taken

The early 1950s marked a rare moment when Iran appeared poised to realise its constitutional promise. Mohammad Mossadegh, a nationalist politician with deep commitment to parliamentary sovereignty, became prime minister in 1951. His central project was the nationalisation of Iran’s oil industry, which had long been dominated by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP), a firm in which the British state itself held a major stake.

Oil was not merely an economic issue; it was a question of sovereignty. For Britain, whose navy had been converted from coal to oil in WWI and relied heavily on Iranian supply, Mossadegh’s policy was unacceptable. For the United States, his nationalism was viewed through the Cold War lens of containment and instability.

In August 1953, British and American intelligence services executed Operation Ajax, a covert effort to remove Mossadegh from power. Declassified records show that Kermit Roosevelt Jr., a senior CIA officer and grandson of former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, operated on the ground in Tehran, coordinating bribery, propaganda, paid street violence, and the manipulation of political and religious networks to manufacture chaos and the appearance of popular revolt.

When the initial coup attempt faltered, the Shah fled the country, first to Baghdad and then Rome. However, days later, the operation achieved its goal. Mossadegh was arrested, the coup consolidated, and the Shah was flown back in - not as a constitutional monarch, as many presently believe, but as a ruler restored by foreign intervention. The consequences were profound. The monarchy’s authority now rested not on law or consent, but on external power. At the same time, the coup permanently fused Iranian political consciousness with suspicion of foreign interference - a legacy that continues to shape debates today.

The Myth of the Constitutional Monarchy

After 1953, the idea of Iran as a constitutional monarchy existed largely on paper. In practice, power increasingly concentrated in the hands of the Shah. Political parties were either suppressed or rendered meaningless. At one point, the Shah merged the country’s legal parties into a single state organisation (the Rastakhiz Party in 1975), later splitting them again to simulate pluralism, though importantly, all remained beholden to the palace.

Repression deepened. SAVAK, the secret police, oversaw a system of surveillance, censorship, arbitrary detention – including at Evin prison - and systematic torture. Religious freedom was also unevenly applied for example the Baháʼís, in particular, faced systematic persecution during the 1950s, including the destruction of religious centres and cemeteries with state acquiescence in 1955. Separatist movements were crushed with force. Mass corruption flourished among a narrow elite tied to the court and the monarchy’s modern image masked an increasingly authoritarian reality.

Revolution Without Institutions

When revolution came in 1979, it did not begin as an Islamist project. It was a broad coalition of workers, students, liberals, leftists, nationalists, clerics, and technocrats united by opposition to autocracy. Yet in the absence of strong democratic institutions, the movement gravitated toward a symbolic figurehead. Ayatollah Khomeini, returning from exile in France, filled that vacuum.

What followed was not pluralism but consolidation. Revolutionary courts, purges, and emergency governance hardened into permanent rule, reinforced by the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988). The mistake was not revolution itself, but the belief that a figurehead could substitute for institutions.

This lesson is not merely historical. The same error risks being repeated today, as some in the diaspora once again search for salvation in symbolic leadership - including the restoration of the Pahlavi monarchy - rather than the slow, difficult work of institutional rebuilding. Modern monarchist narratives that present exile leadership as a shortcut to legitimacy echo earlier illusions, substituting symbolism for political capacity.

Foreign Interference Then and Now

The legacy of 1953 is not paranoia; it is experience. Paid agitators, manipulated media, and foreign engineering were not rumours but documented realities. This history explains why contemporary protests - as legitimate as they are - exist alongside deep suspicion of external influence.

That tension remains visible today in debates over sanctions, potential military strikes, and exile-led political projects. History does not suggest that all unrest is foreign-driven, but it does warn that external actors have repeatedly exploited moments of internal crisis. To ignore that pattern is amnesia.

Lessons for the Present

History is not destiny and Iran is not condemned to repeat its past. But history is a great teacher and its lessons are clear. Democracy cannot be imported, legitimacy cannot be inherited and sovereignty cannot be outsourced.

Iran’s democratic path was not naturally doomed; it was deliberately closed. Reopening it requires resisting the temptation of clean breaks, saviours, and symbolic restorations. It requires institutions rather than icons, participation rather than inheritance, and reform grounded in domestic legitimacy rather than exile narratives.

The tragedy of 1953 was not only a coup, but the narrowing of political imagination. The risk today is not revolution itself, but repeating that narrowing once again - mistaking collapse for liberation, and symbols for solutions.

History, and especially Middle Eastern history, shows that state collapse does not produce freedom. It produces power vacuums, proxy wars, economic ruin, and generational trauma. Iran’s problems will not vanish with a change of flag - whether a restored monarchy banner or a new republican emblem. Nations are not software systems that can be rebooted. They are fragile ecosystems of institutions, borders, identities, and power structures. The real question is not what replaces the Islamic Republic, but rather how Iran transitions without destroying itself in the process.

The Dangerous Fantasy of the “Day After Iran”

In recent months, parts of the Iranian diaspora, especially those in Europe and North America, have looked with growing excitement at events elsewhere, from Venezuela to Ukraine, speculating about the possibility of foreign military intervention or externally engineered regime change in Iran. Some openly discuss the prospect of American strikes as a shortcut to liberation.

Yet Iranians experienced the reality of foreign bombing only last year. During Israel’s twelve-day war against Iran, over a thousand civilians were killed, entire neighbourhoods were destroyed, and millions lived in fear. Bombs do not deliver democracy.

Among parts of the Iranian diaspora, a powerful narrative has taken hold: that Iran is uniquely prepared for regime collapse. Its people are highly educated. Its society is sophisticated. Its culture is ancient. Its middle class is large. Its diaspora is among the most successful in the world. Therefore, the argument goes, Iran will not suffer the same tumultuous fate of Iraq, Libya, Syria, or Afghanistan. This belief is comforting but it is also wrong.

Iraq is considered the “cradle of civilisation” and was once the intellectual heart of the Arab world, home to universities, engineers, scientists, and one of the most advanced state bureaucracies in the region. Libya had Africa’s highest standard of living, free education, free healthcare, and one of the most generous welfare systems on the continent. Syria was a stable, functioning state for decades. Afghanistan had universities and a cosmopolitan elite long before the Soviet tanks rolled in and the Taliban later took over. Yet none of these things protected them from collapse.

When their states fell, their institutions collapsed with them. Borders weakened. Militias emerged. Foreign powers intervened. Economies disintegrated. Entire societies were torn apart. Why would Iran be immune to these dynamics, surely no country is. The belief that Iran will somehow glide smoothly into democracy after a sudden regime collapse is not analysis. At best it seems like wishful thinking.

This is not an argument that collapse is inevitable. It is a warning that complacency about its consequences is deeply misplaced.

Iran’s Structural Vulnerabilities

Iran, like many nation states, is often described as a single, unified nation-state. In reality, its ethnic makeup has produced a highly diverse society, bound together by history but divided by geography, ethnicity, religion, and uneven development. Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, Baluch, Turkmen and others inhabit a country whose borders cut across older cultural and political worlds. Under normal and stable conditions, this diversity would, and should, be celebrated and be seen as a source of strength. However, under conditions of potential state collapse, it becomes a fault line.

Khuzestan, home to much of Iran’s oil wealth, has long suffered from economic marginalisation and environmental neglect. Its predominantly Arab Sunni population occupies a strategic region at the centre of Iran’s energy economy. Baluchistan, straddling the Iranian and Pakistani borders, has a recent history of insurgency (in both Iran and Pakistan) and chronic underdevelopment. Kurdish regions, extending across multiple states, remain politically mobilised and deeply embedded in transnational networks, as demonstrated by near complete Kurdish autonomy in next door Iraq.

Iran’s Azeri population, concentrated in the northwest, also carries a historical memory of autonomy. In 1945–46, an Azeri-backed republic briefly emerged under Soviet protection before being violently crushed by the Shah. Though short-lived, it remains a reminder that centrifugal forces are not new.

These are not abstract vulnerabilities. They are precisely the kinds of regions that foreign powers target in moments of state breakdown. The Middle East is a region shaped by proxy warfare, militia sponsorship, covert operations, and influence campaigns. In a fragmented Iran, separatist movements would become natural entry points for external actors seeking to weaken Tehran’s regional influence. A violent collapse would not be an internal Iranian affair. It would be a regional conflict.

Recent reports that Gulf states sought to restrain American military action against Iran should not be misread as benevolence. Regional powers oppose chaos only when it threatens their own interests. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, Israel, Russia and others would not stand idle. Each would seek to shape the outcome - publicly in the name of Iranian democracy, privately in pursuit of strategic advantage. The result would likely resemble not a transition, but a prolonged struggle over territory, resources (of which there are an abundance) and political control.

The Illusion of the Clean Slate

The belief that Iran’s future can begin anew after regime collapse rests on a deeper illusion: that Iran’s institutions are disposable. A functioning state is not built on slogans, or chants from exile. It is built on bureaucracies, laws, procedures, contracts, courts, regulators, central banks, and professional civil services. Iranians within the country are without doubt capable of building these, however these are slow, unglamorous, and deeply political structures and when they are destroyed, rebuilding them takes decades.

Even if sanctions were lifted overnight, Iran’s economy would not suddenly recover. Corruption networks that predate the revolution would not evaporate. Capital flight would likely continue. Inflation would not simply disappear. Trust in the currency, in the courts, and in the political system would take years to rebuild.

Syria offers a sobering lesson. Even after diplomatic re-engagement and partial sanctions relief, its economy remains shattered, its institutions weakened, and its society deeply fragmented, highlighted by its armed struggle with groups around the country. Reconstruction is slow. Social trust is broken. A generation has been lost. The fantasy of a clean break is appealing because it promises an easy ending to a long tragedy. But nations do not reset. They evolve, fracture, recover, and transform through painful political processes. Iran, and its diaspora, would do well to learn from their neighbours.

Reform Is Hard: The Third Path

None of this is an argument for preserving the Islamic Republic. The system is corrupt, authoritarian, economically destructive, and politically repressive. Its legitimacy is seemingly eroding and its future appears unsustainable. But replacing a failing system with no system at all is not progress.

Real change is slow. It requires rebuilding and technocratic competence as much as political courage. This is not the work of revolutions but the work of transitions - and transitions cannot be imported. Iran does not need another explosion fuelled by foreign intervention, it should instead be seeking a political transformation that preserves the nation state while changing its character. This transition should be rooted inside the country led by its own civil society and anchored in its own institutions shielded from foreign engineering and accountable to its own people. It means building political capacity rather than importing saviours. It means creating legitimacy from participation, not inheritance. It means reforming power, not replacing one elite with another.

The Mirage of the Transitional Saviour

In exile politics, every crisis produces a familiar figure: the “transitional leader”. The reluctant saviour, or the man who promises he does not seek power, only to guide the nation briefly through the storm. The custodian of democracy. The steward of the people’s will. The Middle East is sadly littered with such figures.

In Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi presented himself as a temporary stabiliser after the fall of Hosni Mubarak and Mohamed Morsi. In Syria, Ahmad al-Sharaa now governs under the language of transition and national salvation. In Iraq, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere, interim authorities hardened into permanent rule. The transitions became regimes and the emergency powers became normalised.

Iran is now being sold the same story. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah, speaks of “interim leadership”, “national councils”, and “temporary mandates”. He promises to step aside once democracy is restored, yet no serious institutional framework exists and no constitutional process has been agreed. No internal political coalition has been built and no domestic legitimacy has been established. What we have learnt from history is that power, once acquired in moments of collapse, is rarely surrendered voluntarily.

One of Pahlavi’s opening priorities is not economic reconstruction, institutional reform, or political reconciliation, but recognition of the state of Israel. Some argue that recognition of Israel and alignment with Western security architecture, whether through the Abraham Accords or a Pahlavi’s rebranded “Cyrus Accord”, would bring sanctions relief and economic recovery. But this reduces Iranian sovereignty to a transaction as it suggests that a future Iranian state must first purchase its legitimacy through geopolitical obedience. After decades of foreign intervention, covert operations, sanctions warfare, and open conflict, the Iranian people deserve more than a bargain struck over their heads. The question Iran faces is not which flag should fly above its ministries. It is whether the country will finally escape the cycle of collapse, coercion, and externally brokered order. A transition imposed from exile is not a transition. A democracy delivered by bombs is not a democracy, and a republic built on foreign guarantees is not sovereign.

History does not promise Iran catastrophe, but it does warn what happens when collapse is mistaken for liberation - and when saviours arrive carrying someone else’s agenda.

Subscribe now

For more than four decades, Iranians have lived under a political illusion, sold both inside the country and across the diaspora, that their future lies between only two options: the turban or the crown.

On one side stands the current Islamic Republic; a theocratic state built on clerical authority, ideological repression, and systemic corruption. On the other stands a nostalgic fantasy of monarchy the son of Iran’s last Shah, presented as a ready-made saviour for a broken nation.

But this is a false binary and one that has already failed Iran once before.

In 1979, a broad and diverse revolutionary movement sought leadership and ultimately chose it in an exiled cleric who promised that the Iranian people themselves would decide the country’s future. What followed was not pluralism, but a hijacking of the revolution and the consolidation of a new authoritarian order. Today, the danger is not simply that Iranians seek change, it is that the same structural mistake - searching for salvation in exile leadership - risks being repeated once again.

As events unfold, now through internet blackouts and fragmented reporting, the real tragedy is not that Iranians are desperate for change. It is that so many are being told that change can only come from recycled elites, exiled royalty, or foreign-backed opposition groups with no roots inside the country. Iran does not need another ruler, nor a saviour, what it needs is its sovereignty - and sovereignty must predominantly be built from within.

The Problem of Exile Politics

The danger of exile politics is not theoretical but historical. The 1979 revolution did not begin as an Islamist uprising. It was a broad coalition of students, workers, nationalists, liberals, communists, clerics, technocrats, and ordinary citizens united by opposition to the dictatorship of the Shah. But in the absence of a democratic organisational centre, the movement gravitated toward a symbolic figurehead. The exiled Khomeini filled the vacuum. What followed was not liberation, but the replacement of one elite with another.

Today, the same mistake is being prepared again. Many in the diaspora insist that without a single leader, there can be no credible opposition. History shows the opposite. It is precisely the search for a saviour that creates the conditions for authoritarian restoration. Another hijacking from exile would not be progress. It would be history repeating itself in new clothes.

In 1979, Khomeini himself reassured supporters that he did not seek personal power and that the Iranian people would ultimately decide the country’s political system. That promise culminated in the referendum that established the Islamic Republic. Today, Reza Pahlavi frequently uses similar language, emphasising that Iran’s future system should be decided by the people after the government’s fall. In Iranian culture there is even a word for this kind of rhetorical modesty - tarof - the ritual of politely declining authority while implicitly expecting it to be offered. Yet history shows that referendums conducted during revolutionary upheaval often consolidate the authority of the very figures who claim not to seek it.

Reza Pahlavi has not lived in Iran for over forty years. He was seventeen when the 1979 revolution erupted. Since then, he has lived in Europe and the United States, educated among Western elites, moving through diplomatic circles, think tanks, and lobbying networks. He has never organised politically inside Iran, never built a movement on Iranian soil, never faced prison, surveillance, or repression and has never run for office anywhere. Yet today, he presents himself as a national leader and this is the core contradiction of exile politics: authority without accountability.

This pattern has played out repeatedly. In 2023, a coalition known as the Alliance for Democracy and Freedom in Iran was formed in Washington, bringing together prominent opposition figures including Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, activist Masih Alinejad, footballer Ali Karimi, actress Nazanin Boniadi, and civil society organiser Hamed Esmaeilion. The initiative was intended to present a united democratic front in support of Iran’s protest movement. It collapsed almost immediately amid internal divisions, with several participants and analysts later pointing to disagreements over leadership structure and decision-making. Critics argued that the project failed to establish a genuinely shared framework and that Reza Pahlavi ultimately chose to proceed independently rather than operate within a collective leadership model. What was meant to be a coalition became a hierarchy. Democracy, it seemed, had limits, when it came to his own authority.

Even before the revolution, his experience of Iran was shaped entirely by his position of great privilege. His public appearances were photo opportunities with his father. His social world consisted of royal courts, diplomats, generals, and wealthy elites, the very class whose corruption and detachment helped fuel the 1979 revolution itself and now find themselves celebrating unfolding events from abroad unharmed. Reza did not endure the repression and punishment of SAVAK (the Shah’s feared intelligence service), the censorship, the economic marginalisation, or political repression brought down by his father, and yet he now claims to speak for a nation whose daily reality he has not shared for most of his life. For those who have followed his rise in exile politics, this gap between perception and reality is hardly surprising.…

Rose tinted Glasses - Whitewashing a Dictatorship

Reza Pahlavi rarely confronts the reality of his father’s rule. Mohammad Reza Shah’s reign (1941–1979) was not merely flawed, it was authoritarian. Political parties were crushed. The press was censored. Dissidents were imprisoned, tortured, and disappeared by SAVAK throughout his rule.

Despite the rhetoric of modernisation, the Shah’s Westernisation agenda alienated vast segments of society. Whilst some in the diaspora nostalgically recall the ski lifts he built in the mountains, his White Revolution widened inequality, destabilised rural communities, and entrenched a new oligarchy tied to the palace while weakening traditional social structures without replacing them with accountable institutions. Most critically, his monarchy rested on the destruction of Iran’s democracy.

In 1953, the CIA and MI6 orchestrated Operation Ajax, overthrowing Iran’s elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he moved to nationalise Iran’s oil industry. The coup crushed Iran’s constitutional experiment and reinstalled the Shah as a pliant ruler. That betrayal shaped modern Iranian political consciousness and it planted the seeds of the revolution.

Yet when confronted with this legacy, Reza Pahlavi minimises it. In an interview with Patrick Bet-David, he dismissed many SAVAK victims as “KGB agents,” erasing the teachers, students, journalists, and intellectuals who suffered under his father’s regime. In another interview on French television, Pahlavi referred to the abuses of the Shah’s security apparatus as “excesses.” But torture chambers are not excesses. Political imprisonment is not excess. These were structural features of an authoritarian state, and democracies are built not by minimising past crimes but by confronting them honestly. A movement that cannot clearly acknowledge the darker aspects of its own history risks reproducing them itself. This is not reckoning with history. It is repackaging it.

Reza Pahlavi’s political identity is not that of a reformer. It is that of a restorer. His appeal rests not on policy, organisation, or democratic mobilisation, but on a filtered nostalgia for a political order that collapsed under the weight of its own repression. This mythology is not merely inaccurate - it is dangerous. Iranians did not rise up in 1979 because they rejected progress. They rose up because they were suffocating under one man’s version of it. If Iran’s future is to be taken seriously, then its past must be confronted honestly, especially when the same surname keeps reappearing in the political imagination.

The Diaspora Delusion

Among parts of the Iranian diaspora, particularly in Los Angeles, London, and Washington, a powerful nostalgia persists. It is a curated memory of the monarchy that is less history than fantasy. Diaspora youth repost Instagram reels of women in miniskirts, images of the lavish 1971 Persepolis celebrations, crown jewels and peacock thrones and the fact that Frank Sinatra came to Tehran - a story told through champagne photographs, and filtered images of pre-revolution Tehran that erases the repression, inequality, and political suffocation experienced by millions. This is not collective memory. This is class memory.

Many, though not all, who fled after 1979 were members of the old elite: military officers, senior bureaucrats, business magnates, and palace insiders. For them, the 1979 revolution was not liberation; it was loss. Loss of status. Loss of wealth. Loss of power. So they remember champagne, not censorship, glamour but not prison cells, jewellery but not torture chambers. They do not speak of Black Friday in 1978, when the Shah’s military opened fire on protesters in Jaleh Square, killing hundreds. They do not speak of student raids, press bans, political purges, or the suffocating atmosphere of fear.

In more extreme corners of monarchist discourse on social media, this nostalgia has gone even further. Calls for “SAVAK 2.0” have circulated online, illustrating how historical memory can be distorted when filtered through exile politics. The lesson of Iran’s past should be that repression breeds revolution. Instead, some appear eager to recreate the very institutions that helped produce the crisis of 1979.

It would appear they want a sequel, not a reckoning.

The Moral Collapse

The moral failure of exile leadership has become impossible to ignore. During Israel’s 12-day war against Iran, Israeli airstrikes reportedly killed over a thousand Iranian civilians (similar numbers of deaths have started graver conflicts in the region). Entire neighbourhoods were destroyed. Families were buried under rubble. Surely any sane Iranian would condemn such acts against their own people. Reza Pahlavi did not condemn the bombing. Instead, he praised Israel’s actions and called on Iranians to rise up while bombs were falling on their cities. Among segments of his monarchist base, this posture was echoed publicly. At demonstrations in London and Los Angeles, some supporters were seen waving Israeli flags alongside the pre-revolutionary Pahlavi-era flag. For many Iranians, including those deeply opposed to the Islamic Republic, this symbolism was profoundly alienating. It reinforced the perception that exile politics has become untethered from the lived experience and national sentiment of people inside the country. It also exposed a deeper moral contradiction. Many of the same voices who rightly condemned the Islamic Republic for killing Iranian protesters fell silent when Iranian civilians were killed by foreign bombs. In that moment it became clear that, for some, the issue was not Iranian lives but who was responsible for taking them.

From Paris and Washington, Reza continued to urge people to take to the streets knowing full well that protest in Iran is punished with prison, torture, and death. He was asking others to bleed for his ambition, reinforcing that the apple has not fallen far from the family tree. This was not leadership. This was recklessness. It is the same moral logic that once led the MEK to side with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War while Iranian cities were being bombed. Different decade, same contempt for Iranian lives. In both cases, the people under fire were expendable.

Civil War? Surely not!

Sadly for many proud Iranians, Iran is not immune to collapse. Many in the diaspora speak as if Iran’s civilisation, education levels, and cultural sophistication make it immune to the disasters that destroyed Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan, however this is a fantasy born out of naivety, or worse, wilful denial.

Iraq was once one of the most developed countries in the region. Libya had Africa’s highest living standards. Syria was stable for decades. Afghanistan had universities before it had warlords. None were immune to the sweeping destruction and consequences that befell them following foreign intervention, whether framed as humanitarian or strategic.

Iran is an extraordinarily diverse country — Persians, Kurds, Azeris, Arabs, Baluch, Turkmen — with deep regional identities, economic inequalities, and geopolitical vulnerabilities. The ingredients for fragmentation exist. The region of Khuzestan holds Iran’s oil ( a huge irony where the Arab Sunni majority area holds the oil in a predominantly Shiia Muslim country, whilst Iran’s big rival Saudi Arabia’s main oil region is home to the country’s Shiia minority). Baluchistan has long resisted Tehran’s authority (and Islamabad’s). Kurdish regions straddle multiple borders calling for independence. Foreign powers and entities are already circling.

A civil war would not be an internal Iranian affair and a violent collapse would not bring freedom. It would likely bring partition, proxy wars, militias, and decades of instability. Those who dismiss this as regime propaganda need only look at the map. It would be naïve to assume that Iran’s rivals would remain passive in the event of state collapse. The Gulf region has long operated through proxy warfare, militia sponsorship, and influence campaigns. In a fragmented Iran, separatist movements in regions such as Khuzestan or Baluchistan would become natural entry points for external powers seeking to weaken Tehran’s regional influence. History suggests that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Türkiye, Israel, and others would all seek to shape the outcome, not in the interests of Iranian democracy, but in the interests of regional hegemony.

The Third Path: Sovereignty Without Saviours

Iran does not need a crown. It does not need an MEK cult and it does not need a cleric-state. You cannot detox a country’s politics by drinking the poison that made it sick in the first place. What it needs is a democratic republic built on law, accountability, and competence. A state where a woman without a hijab can run against a man in a turban, and the winner is chosen not for their identity, but their policies. A country where religion is respected, but does not necessarily rule. Where secularism protects faith instead of persecuting it, and where belief is private and law is public.

This is not a radical demand. It is simply normal governance. Iran needs a technocratic transition, to break the oft seen cycle of strongman or military influence followed by weak or partial reform followed by slow normalisation. Iran does not require another “strongman” or least of all a ruler beholden to foreign interests. Sanctions will not disappear overnight and corruption networks will not evaporate, and the economy will not magically recover. Iran will need institutional rebuilding: courts, banks, regulators, ministries, independent media, and anti-corruption prosecutions. It may well need constitutional reform that reflects its ethnic and religious diversity. It will need decentralisation, transparency, and reconciliation.

This work need not exclude exiles, but it must be led by those who stayed. Consider figures like Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, student leaders, women’s rights organisers, labour activists, journalists, lawyers, environmentalists and more, people who paid the price, faced batons and bullets, those who understand the street and the country better than anyone else. Diaspora Iranians should look first to support these figures and movements, they may not be perfect but they did not receive their legitimacy from their grandfather placing a crown on his head and declaring a kingdom.

Iran’s tragedy has always been foreign interference paired with domestic authoritarianism. The Shah was installed by Western intelligence agencies and fed their pockets. The Islamic Republic consolidated power through repression. Now exiles seek foreign backing once again. This cycle must end. Iran does not need royal rescue, it needs to be allowed to choose.

Iran’s future will not be saved by a crown returned from exile nor by a clerical state clinging to power. It will be shaped by the millions of Iranians who continue to live, struggle, and resist inside the country itself. The lesson of the last century is not that Iran needs a stronger ruler. It is that Iran must finally build institutions strong enough that it never needs one again.

The false binary of turban or crown has dominated Iranian politics for over a century. It has delivered coups, dictatorships, revolutions, repression, war, and exile. It has failed. It is time to pursue a third path, a harder, slower, riskier path but the only path that offers dignity.