A portrait of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last shah of Iran, is displayed in a shop in London.Isabel Infantes/Reuters
Scott Anderson is the author of King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation, which is on the shortlist for the 2026 Lionel Gelber Prize, presented by the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.
Twice in the past 48 years, events have pushed Iran to the precipice of both radical change and unspeakable carnage.
The first occasion was the revolution of 1978-79, which led to the overthrow of Iran’s imperial government and the advent of an Islamic theocracy. That revolution certainly spurred radical change, heralding a surge in religious extremism worldwide, even as the number of those killed in the conflict – about 2,500 by best estimate – was comparatively small.
The final outcome and body count of the second event, the war now being waged on Iran by Israel and the United States, is, of course, yet to be determined. That said, some guidance might be gleaned by considering the personalities of the two leaders at the centre of these twin upheavals. That’s because the ultimate course of the Iranian Revolution was largely decided by the actions – or inactions – of a single man: Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God on Earth. Similarly, the violence now being visited on Iran rests most heavily on the actions of one person, a man who would surely thrill to hold the titles bestowed on the other: Donald Trump.
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At first glance, it would seem hard to find two leaders more dissimilar. The shah of Iran was a famously distant man, aloof and socially awkward, while Mr. Trump possesses a kind of brash, glad-handing charisma. Even the shah’s enemies acknowledged his brilliance, that he possessed a nearly encyclopedic grasp of issues that interested him. By contrast, even Mr. Trump’s most devoted acolytes note that he is uninformed on most matters and quickly bores of details, while the dubious claim of a superior mind is most loudly promoted by the “stable genius” himself. This indolence has helped fuel a belief that many of Mr. Trump’s initiatives are actually the handiwork of minions cleverer and more calculating than he is. In imperial Iran, by contrast, no one doubted that even the most mundane functions of state – the promotion of an Air Force major, say, or the naming of a new highway – required the personal consideration and approval of the shah.
In other ways, the similarities between the two are rather remarkable. Both were raised in the shadow of tyrannical fathers they sought to emulate but forever felt small beside. The result in both men, in the view of many observers, was an abiding sense of inadequacy, a bedrock insecurity to be masked by arrogance and the projection of power, a constant need for affirmation and praise that no amount of adoring crowds or fawning toadies could satisfy. By palace protocol, even the shah’s closest advisers bowed and kissed his hand by way of greeting, while the more ardent took to prostrating themselves for the privilege of kissing his shoes. Mr. Trump is in the habit of periodically gathering his Cabinet secretaries so that they might sing his praises to assembled journalists, bizarre spectacles that would seem more befitting of Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. Just as with the shah, Mr. Trump has a passion for pomp and pageantry, the more glittery and gauche the better, and promotes the notion of his nation as exceptional, with himself as the anointed one who will restore its lost glory. In Mr. Trump’s vow to “make America great again” is an echo of the shah’s mission “Toward a Great Civilization.”
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Yet, the psychopathology shared by the two leaders has tended to yield very different outcomes in moments of crisis.
Despite his ostentatious displays of power and demands for fealty, the King of Kings was, at his core, a soft man masquerading as a hard one. Throughout his 37-year reign, he looked to others to do his dirty work for him and vacillated when pushed to act. In 1953, he dithered to the last possible moment over whether to approve a CIA-led coup that would return his kingly powers from a grasping prime minister, and then sat out the coup in a Rome hotel. Faced with a cleric-led uprising in 1963, he turned to his prime minister at the time to put the army in the streets and arrest the ringleader, a firebrand cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini. When, in 1978, the King of Kings faced a revolution with the same ayatollah serving as its spiritual leader, he once again desperately looked to others – his ministers, his military, the CIA, Jimmy Carter – to offer a solution. No one did. Instead, faced with the choice of truly unleashing his army, a move that undoubtedly would have caused the deaths of tens of thousands, the shah froze. As he told confidantes time and again in the last months of the revolution, if saving his throne was to come at the cost of killing his nation’s youth, he wouldn’t do it. And so he did not. After vacillating until the very end, the King of Kings slipped out of Iran, never to return, and paved the way for the clerical dictatorship to come. The number of Iranians killed during the 13-month span of the revolution would be surpassed by the execution squads of the shah’s inheritors in a matter of weeks.
So in considering the current conflict in Iran and how it might end, it may be an interesting thought experiment to ponder what its chief architect, Donald Trump, would have done if he had been in the shah’s shoes in 1979. Would he, too, have been paralyzed by indecision? Would he, too, have chosen flight and exile over setting his army loose? It’s hard to imagine so. Instead, he almost certainly would have seen the rebellion as a personal affront, a grand display of what he has always feared the most – humiliation – and lashed out accordingly. It is all but impossible to conceive of Mr. Trump slinking off in self-recognized defeat. To the contrary, if he had been the King of Kings in 1979, the outcome of the revolution would surely have looked far more like what occurred in Iran’s streets this past January when the regime turned its guns on protesters in earnest.
At the same time, imagining the shah in Mr. Trump’s current situation is all but impossible; the meticulous, plodding shahanshah would never have careered carelessly into a war in the first place, let alone without any idea of how to get out.
All of which suggests the potential for a truly horrific end to Iran’s current conflict. With the Tehran regime showing no sign of relenting, and most certainly not acquiescing to Mr. Trump’s demand for unconditional surrender, the stage seems set for a bloodbath if for no better reason than for the American President to avoid humiliation. Except that Mr. Trump possesses at least one extraordinary talent that offers the possibility of a less bloody way out: the ability to change the conversation. As he has so many times throughout his life and presidency when met by an obstacle that will not bend to his will, that he can’t bully into submission, Mr. Trump can employ his carnival barker’s skill at turning the public’s attention away from what he has set before them in favour of a different shiny object.
So regime change? Unconditional surrender? Not at all likely, and if that doesn’t come to pass, Mr. Trump always has the option – an option never afforded the shah – of declaring victory, of packing up and going home.