By playing the American card, Iran’s theocracy has gained a new lease on life

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Scott Anderson is the author of King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation.

For the past several years, I’ve maintained a discreet internet correspondence with a group of Iranian professionals for a book I was writing on the Iranian Revolution and the overthrow of the shah in 1978-79. I had hoped to go to Iran in person to conduct my research, but when I was strongly warned against doing so – the current regime has the disappointing habit of imprisoning Westerners on trumped-up charges of spying – I figured cultivating an online community was the next best thing. Admittedly, most members of this community are opposed to Iran’s present theocratic government to some degree – for this reason, they requested anonymity to speak frankly – but there’s actually quite a wide range of voices among them; certainly their dissatisfaction with the current government doesn’t automatically translate into support for wholesale regime change, even less for a return of the deposed monarchy. In the wake of the recent bombing strikes on Iran by Israel and the United States, I was interested to hear my contacts’ views on the situation. I was rather taken aback by their responses.

While I had anticipated a certain rallying-around-the-flag effect among Iranians after the air strikes – as a general rule, people don’t appreciate having bombs dropped on them by foreign armies – I was surprised by the level of despondency among the more ardent dissidents. “These attacks have set our movement back years,” one told me. “I think before we were on the verge of dramatic change, but now all that is gone.” The reason, he explained, was that the regime could now tar all domestic opponents as lackeys of the Israelis and Americans, collaborators with those who had killed hundreds of their fellow citizens. In this way, it was posited, the sclerotic theocracy that has held sway over Iran for nearly 50 years has gained a new lease on life.

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But as it turned out, this was just the starting point. Where matters grew curious was when several of my contacts spun out a theory which held that Iran’s regime not only welcomed the attacks but helped engineer them by deliberately spurning negotiations until American bombs had joined the Israeli ones. One went so far as to suggest a secret deal had been cut between Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s hard-line Prime Minister, and the Iranian government, with U.S. President Donald Trump acting as the middleman.

Obviously, this requires a bit of explanation.

Generalizations about entire nationalities are always a risky thing, but a generalization that Iranians love conspiracy theories? Not so much. Over the course of researching my book, I think I heard most every conspiracy-theory permutation of “what really happened” in the Iranian Revolution that human imagination could devise. I had otherwise normal and intelligent Iranians tell me matter-of-factly that Ayatollah Khomeini, one of the late 20th-century’s more virulent antisemites, was actually an Israeli agent of influence, or that the 1979-81 American hostage crisis was engineered by Chase Manhattan Bank so that it could seize the billions of Iranian petrodollars stored in its vaults. Even the shah of Iran intermittently embraced a conspiracy theory that had his American and British allies conspiring in his overthrow as part of a secret pact with the Soviet Union.

Yet, without wholly embracing my internet friends’ conspiracy theories, their comments did put me in mind of one particular episode during the Iranian Revolution. It occurred in early September, 1978, and proved to be a watershed moment in the evolution of the revolt. In mirror image, I feel it also casts an interesting light on the situation in Iran today.

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By September of 1978, there had been an unpredictable ebb and flow of industrial strikes and street demonstrations protesting the government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi for nearly a year. Earlier that summer it appeared the protest movement was starting to fizzle out, with a number of planned rallies producing only meagre turnouts. In mid-August, however, the opposition gained a new impetus when an arson attack on a packed movie-house left some 400 dead, the handiwork, many believed of the shah’s secret police, SAVAK. (A post-revolution investigation would establish it was actually carried out by anti-shah religious extremists.) By the beginning of September, the street demonstrations in Tehran and other Iranian cities had once again grown to massive proportions, frequently leading to violent confrontations with security forces. Under pressure from his generals and more militant advisers, the shah agreed to impose martial law, and to declare that illegal street demonstrations would be broken up by force. Unfortunately, this edict was issued at 6 a.m. on the morning of Sept. 8, just three hours before it was to go into effect. The result was that one column of protesters, either unaware of the edict or determined to flout it, were confronted by a company of soldiers in a Tehran traffic circle known as Jaleh Square.

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The precise trigger for what happened next is still the subject of spirited debate within Iran, but what is known is that the soldiers opened fire on the protesters massed just before them. Within minutes, at least 100 demonstrators were dead and hundreds wounded in a massacre soon to become known as Black Friday. It was at this moment that the shah made perhaps the worst decision of his 37 years on the Peacock Throne: He played the American card.

Ever since assuming the throne from his father in 1941, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had anxiously sought to curry favour with the United States, the superpower that might protect his nation from the intrigues of regional powers and Iran’s acquisitive northern neighbour, the Soviet Union. For a very long time, these efforts had little effect: locked in Cold War competition with the Soviets around the world, the United States wasn’t eager to open up yet another front by building up Iran’s army and, still awash in domestic oil, had little need of the one commodity Iran had to offer. Even after a 1953 CIA-assisted coup restored the shah to power over a nationalist prime minister, Iran remained very much a second- or third-tier concern for Washington.

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That began to change in the late 1960s with the international tightening of the oil market, and with Iran assuming the role of pro-Western regional policemen. It changed very dramatically in the mid-1970s when, in the wake of the 1973 Arab-oil embargo, the shah engineered a quadrupling of oil prices in a mere six months, triggering a worldwide recession but also providing him with the funds to build the world-class military he had always dreamed of. It also cemented the American-Iranian alliance to a degree scarcely conceivable a few years earlier: Virtually overnight, the kingdom was responsible for over half of all American foreign arms sales and tens of thousands of Americans were living in Tehran to help propel the Iranian economic miracle. In turn, some 50,000 Iranians were attending American universities and the shah’s anti-communist regime had become a vital bulwark against Soviet inroads in the region.

But it was an alliance that came with a downside. With the shah constantly touting his close ties with Washington, many Iranians blamed the Americans when their overheated economy slipped into recession in 1976, when they saw the petrodollar billions being spent on the latest American weaponry rather than on the needs of the people. Conservative Iranians resented the ever-greater number of Westerners living in their midst, a horde that drove up housing prices and showed scant regard for local or religious customs. On top of this was the enduring memory of the 1953 CIA-led coup that had placed the nation back in the hands of “the American shah.” By 1977, to be in opposition to the shah was increasingly synonymous with opposing the ever-expanding influence the United States exerted in the kingdom.

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This became nakedly apparent when the shah made a state visit to Washington in mid-November of that year to meet the new American president, Jimmy Carter. What was meant to be a triumphant meeting between the heads-of-state instead turned into a public-relations disaster when thousands of anti-shah demonstrators took to the streets in the worst act of civil unrest in the U.S. capital in nearly a decade. Emboldened by the unseemly spectacle in Washington, within days dissidents in Iran staged the first major anti-government protests in at least as long. Six weeks later, when Mr. Carter paid a quick reciprocal visit to Tehran, the phenomenon replicated itself; indeed, just days later, the Iranian Revolution began in earnest.

The shah appeared to remain resolutely oblivious to this phenomenon, to understand that in addition to sparking a religious revival, the opposition to his rule had taken on the trappings of an anti-colonial movement. This was a double-hit that even the nimblest of dictators might have difficulty navigating, but the King of Kings seemed to go out of his way to make matters worse. Time and again as the threat to his throne intensified, he begged the Carter administration to publicly proclaim its full-throated support of him, utterly blind to the fact that this was simply throwing more fuel on the revolutionary fires.

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While the Carter administration made a staggering number of mistakes in Iran, it at least grasped this. By September of 1978, with the shah again beseeching the Americans for another public pledge of support, the Carter White House had taken its time to cobble together a rather tepid open letter restating their endorsement of the politic reforms the shah was seeking to undertake. Just before the letter was finalized, though, there came the killings of Black Friday.

At that moment, President Carter was ensconced at the Camp David presidential retreat with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin as he tried to forge a Middle East peace treaty. Mr. Sadat and the shah were close friends, and upon hearing the grim news out of Tehran, he broke away from the negotiations to put a call through to the monarch. Mr. Sadat was sufficiently alarmed by the shah’s tone – he spoke in a hushed whisper, as if in shock – that he urged Mr. Carter to personally contact him, as well.

This posed something of a dilemma. Obviously, releasing a public letter of support right on the heels of the massacre was out of the question, so Mr. Carter’s advisers decided on a discreet and private telephone call to boost the shah’s spirits.

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Afterward, Mr. Carter returned to his negotiations, but just hours later the Americans were stunned to learn the shah had released a transcript of their conversation to the Iranian media, underscoring the praise and support Mr. Carter had allegedly offered. The effect was immediate and catastrophic.

“What it said to the people in the [Iranian] streets,” explained the State Department’s Iran desk officer, Henry Precht, “was that the Americans were standing behind the shah, supporting his shooting of the people in Jaleh Square.”

From then on, in the view of most all Iranians, the shah and the Americans were joined at the hip, and if the revolution were to succeed, the first casualty might be the shah, but the second would be American standing in the nation. That, of course, is precisely what happened, and not only the United States but the entire Western world has been living with the repercussions of a xenophobic and militantly religious Iran ever since.

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So just how does this long-ago story cast a light on the current situation in Iran?

In the 46 years since the Iranian Revolution succeeded, the Tehran regime has been periodically buffeted by threats to its rule. The first came just months after the shah was deposed when a number of different Iranian ethnic groups, most notably the Kurds, attempted to win their autonomy or independence. This was followed in 2009 by nationwide protests when massive electoral fraud ensured the return of a hard-line president over a moderate. Most recently has been the demonstrations of the Women, Life and Freedom Movement following the death of a young woman at the hands of the so-called Morality Police. Each time, the regime has responded with violence and mass arrests. Each time they have also suggested the protesters are in the service of those who seek to destroy Iran: namely, Israel and the United States. Even as the regime faced these internal threats, it steadily expanded its influence throughout the region by forging alliances with dictatorships as in Syria, and with armed guerrilla forces like the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

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Over the past year of war, though, the Israelis have steadily eliminated or severely depleted each one of these Iranian proxies. In surveying this landscape of disaster, the Tehran regime had to have been worried about its own survival. With the national economy in shambles thanks to sanctions and mismanagement, popular discontent was steadily growing. The Women, Life and Freedom Movement, while quashed for the moment, could gain new fervour at any time. Even Iran’s much-vaunted weaponry, the missiles that might some day rain down on Tel Aviv, proved to be next to worthless. But then, in June, the war came to the Iranian heartland itself in the form of Israeli air strikes, and suddenly the regime had a unifying cause with which to win over the disaffected – and, of course, to tar those who would continue to complain at a time of national emergency.

“When I saw Netanyahu say, ‘this is about regime change,’” my leading internet conspiracy-theorist explained, “that’s when I knew we were finished, that a secret deal had been made. This is what Netanyahu does, the same as he did in Palestine.”

He was referring to long-standing accusations that Mr. Netanyahu had once secretly funnelled money and weaponry to Hamas, the same group that carried out the mass-killings in Israel in October, 2023. Mr. Netanyahu’s rationale, according to his accusers, was to empower the Hamas extremists against the far more moderate Palestinian Authority so as to make negotiations toward a two-state solution impossible. “So now he has done the same with Iran,” my interlocutor explained. “He needs the extremists. The last thing he wants is a moderate Iran.”

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Best of all, so this line of thinking goes, the Tehran regime was able to draw in the American warplanes, thereby neatly resurrecting the long-ago accusation that Washington was forever seeking Iran’s destruction. To top it off was the squalid way in which the Trump administration carried out its “Pearl Harbor” attack, telling Iran it had two weeks to begin negotiations, only to launch its bombers two days later. “And then to retaliate,” my contact expounded, “the regime sends these silly little rockets at Qatar, and tells the Americans ahead of time they’re doing it! Of course it was all planned.”

One doesn’t have to embrace this admittedly rather convoluted conspiracy theory to appreciate the end result. After Black Friday in September of 1978, the shah played the American card, and neither he nor the United States were able to recover from the stain of it. In the summer of 2025, the regime in Tehran is employing a mirror image of that card to ensure its survival. Despite the span of nearly a half-century, it’s still a very potent card to play.