Reza Pahlavi speaks to the press as he takes part in a roundtable discussion regarding the situation in Iran at the Dutch parliament in The Hague on July 6.PHIL NIJHUIS/AFP/Getty Images
As missiles yet again strike Iran while its theocratic regime remains firmly in power, a question hangs in the air: What happened to the exiled son of a monarch who was supposed to be rescuing the country?
Reza Pahlavi, the self-styled successor to the Shah of Iran, was widely expected to be marching into Tehran, taking back his family’s Niavaran Palace home, winning the loyalty of the military and the gratitude of the Iranian people, and restoring his country to the place it held before the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Who is Reza Pahlavi, the exiled former Iranian crown prince calling on citizens to protest?
But Mr. Pahlavi is a failure. He never set foot in Iran, did not persuade a single soldier or government official to defect, does not appear to have organized any succession mechanism in Iran, and apparently never really won the trust or backing of U.S. or Israeli leaders. Those leaders now claim they wanted the Islamic regime to stay in power – just with more pliant leaders. Mr. Pahlavi has returned to the role he held before 2025: Giving speeches to right-wing groups in the U.S. and Europe, promoting monarchist propaganda on TV, and raising money for himself.
So the larger question being asked by many Iranians today is a grim one: How did we get duped by this guy?
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Fewer than two years ago, Iran was in the midst of a feminist revolution. It was largely successful in its societal goals, and many analysts felt it stood a better-than-even chance of unseating the Islamic regime.
The “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests began in 2022 following the vicious prison death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, and soon escalated into a general nationwide movement against the Islamic regime, which polls showed more than 70 per cent wanted to end. It is now normal for Iranian women to leave their heads uncovered – the dress laws remain in effect, but few officials dare enforce them.
Then that movement became something else. By the end of 2025, the most-heard chants had changed from “Woman, Life, Freedom” to “Reza Shah, may your soul rest in peace,” and the Pahlavi dynasty’s lion-and-sun flag was seen over protests in Iran, and especially in major Iranian-diaspora cities such as Toronto, where as many as 350,000 people took to the streets in what appeared to be largely a monarchist-focused protest. On Jan. 8-9, it’s estimated as many as 30,000 protesters were slaughtered by Iranian forces after Mr. Pahlavi urged them to hit the streets unarmed.
The democracy movement had been taken over by an anti-democrat. In 2023 Mr. Pahlavi had met with protest leaders in Washington, demanded exclusive control and drove republican-minded protest leaders to quit. He then visited Israel, met openly with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and appeared to win the Jewish state’s support – which only raised his popularity among desperate Iranians, many of whom saw him as the only escape route.
To understand Mr. Pahlavi’s implausible rise, I spoke to Arash Azizi, the Yale University historian (and Canadian of Iranian descent) whose book What Iranians Want chronicles and analyzes the protest movement.
“He always kept up political activity and tried to sell himself as an alternative. But he was mostly not taken seriously by Iranians,” who saw him as a fetish of the disconnected diaspora, Dr. Azizi said. “But in recent years, with the continued failure of the regime and inability of the rest of the Iranian opposition to offer much of an alternative, Pahlavi grew in stature. He seemed to be one of the most consistent and serious faces in the Iranian opposition. TV satellite channels based in the West and broadcasting to Iran started promoting him and platforming him in a major way.”
Some describe his emergence as the product of foreign influence operations by Israel and by movements in the United States. Those existed, but the influence was no secret. Mr. Pahlavi had previously been backed and funded by Washington and by Gulf Arab countries, but they concluded by the 2010s that he was not a serious figure with a practical plan. Mr. Netanyahu, and possibly President Donald Trump, seemed to believe him for a while, though not by the time the war began.
In early March, a few Iranians told me and my colleagues they were still optimistic about a Pahlavi-led transition, but most had realized they’d been taken. However, many feel the regime’s worst cruelty and mass killings may have ended with the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The appetite for democratic change among Iranians is stronger than ever, Dr. Azazi says, but with one difference: “Neo-monarchism is unlikely to have much of a future,” he said, because Iranians now know that “Pahlavi himself is too inept to lead a serious movement.”