PARIS (Reuters) — As the US and Israel went to war on Iran this year, a transformative moment seemed to have arrived for Reza Pahlavi, son of the autocratic shah who was overthrown in 1979.

Despite not having set foot in Iran in almost half a century, Pahlavi had been actively campaigning in the US and Europe, giving speeches about a bright new future for his homeland, raising money and meeting elected officials.

“The Iranian people have called on me to lead the transition after the regime is gone,” he declared on the social media platform X shortly after the war began in late February. “I have accepted that responsibility.”

In Texas this March, Pahlavi received one of the most enthusiastic receptions at the Conservative Political Action Conference. As he took the stage, staunch supporters of US President Donald Trump and a large contingent of Iranian Americans, many draped in the pre-revolution Iranian flag that flew during his father’s rule, lavished him with a 45‑second standing ovation.

Four days later, Trump horrified many Iranian emigres by declaring in a social-media post: “we are blasting Iran into oblivion or, as they say, back to the Stone Ages!!!”

To the shock of some of Pahlavi’s Iranian-American financial supporters — one of whom said the donors had recently given his campaign more than $3 million in the hope he could lead a new, transitional government in Iran — the exiled prince didn’t swiftly condemn Trump’s remarks.

Now, Pahlavi’s triumphant appearance at CPAC appears to mark the apex of his rise as the most visible candidate vying to step in should the hardline Islamic government fall. Although he continues to campaign, his candidacy has sputtered.

In mid-January, Trump told Reuters that Pahlavi “seems very nice, but I don’t know how he’d play within his own country.” And behind the scenes his administration sidelined the prince.

As Iranian-American human rights activist Ahmad Batebi prepared to address a January 15 United Nations Security Council meeting on Tehran’s bloody crackdown on protests earlier that month, US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz personally urged him not to mention Pahlavi by name, according to two people familiar with the exchange. Although Batebi supports Pahlavi, he complied.

In a statement, Waltz told Reuters he suggested “a tight focus” on Batebi’s own experience of torture in Iranian prisons and “the barbarism of the regime” would make “the greatest impact, rather than opposition politics.”

In June, the tattered ceasefire pact signed by the US and Iran made no mention of regime change. Instead, the UٍS agreed to respect Iran’s sovereignty and refrain from interfering in its internal affairs — and publicly dismissed Pahlavi again.

“The President of the United States never said that his goal was to install Reza Pahlavi to become the new leader of Iran,” US Vice President JD Vance told podcaster Megyn Kelly after Trump announced the US-Iran memorandum of understanding on June 14. Pahlavi and his top aides were left to blast the agreement on social media.

Meanwhile, some of Pahlavi’s financial backers, who communicate in a private WhatsApp group, have grown disillusioned not just by his muted criticism of Trump’s extreme wartime threats.

In private calls, according to three people familiar with the matter, Pahlavi listened to but ultimately ignored their advice to try harder to unify the opposition and to forcefully condemn some of his more radical supporters’ violence against and harassment of other Iranian dissidents. There is no evidence that Pahlavi had anything to do with those incidents.

Pahlavi’s faltering leadership bid highlights one of the major flaws in the US-Israeli war on Iran: the lack of a clear alternative to the Islamic Republic.

Shortly after the bombing began in late February, Trump called for the Iranian people to rise up and take over their government. But despite an air strike that killed the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the government has survived the onslaught — and in the view of many Iran watchers, has tightened its hold on power.

‘I’m a bridge to the destination’

In two interviews with Reuters this month, including a lengthy video sit-down in Paris, Pahlavi stressed that Iran’s current government is “very close” to collapse.

“This campaign started as a lifetime mission to liberate Iran 46 years ago,” he said. “And it has never been about me. It’s been about the Iranian people and their right to self-determination.”

His role, he said, is to lead a transition to a new democratic government: “I’m not the destination, I’m a bridge to the destination.”

The Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York didn’t respond to requests for comment.

While Pahlavi’s supporters see him as a unifier, several attempts he was involved in to unite the long-divided opposition collapsed. In one case in 2023, three people familiar with the matter say, his wife insulted other opposition leaders, which she denies. Two activists also say he was mostly all talk and no action during a campaign to designate as a terrorist organization the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which wields vast military, political and economic power in Iran.

For this story, Reuters interviewed more than 50 people, including eight of Pahlavi’s current and former associates; reviewed hundreds of pages of legal documents; and sifted through extensive video, photographic and social-media records of Pahlavi and his supporters, some of whom favor a restoration of Iran’s pre-revolutionary monarchy.

Pahlavi’s main credential is being the son of the last shah of Iran. Unlike many successful revolutionaries of the recent past, such as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, Poland’s Lech Walesa or the Islamists who overthrew his father, Pahlavi doesn’t seem to have a mass organized movement inside the country ready to roll into power. Iran’s repressive government also has culled potential alternative opposition leaders who might have risen to Pahlavi’s level of prominence, imprisoning or killing thousands of dissidents and allegedly trying to assassinate critics abroad.

Far from a sputtering campaign, Pahlavi described a robust “mobilization to overcome this regime” and told Reuters it’s “not true” that he hasn’t built a mass movement.

Huge numbers of Iranians heeded his call to protest in the streets on January 8 and 9, he said, and many died when the government responded with gunfire. He said he communicates with “cell leaders” of “over a thousand different groupings” that span labor, academia, religion and ethnic organizations “to be ready to intervene the moment that we have that opening.”

Reuters was unable to independently confirm how many groups inside Iran are working with him.

It was Tehran’s massacre of demonstrators in January that Pahlavi changed his view on foreign intervention, he said.

That month, an Iranian official told Reuters that deaths in street protests had reached at least 5,000; Pahlavi puts the figure at 40,000. “This regime demonstrates that it has no mercy whatsoever,” he said. “It’s willing to kill thousands upon thousands of its own citizens, and therefore there has to be an adjustment of how you look at things.”

The Iranian people are still the “boots on the ground,” he said, but they need foreign military help to “equal the playing field.”

He said he hasn’t sought the endorsement of any government or leader: “It is not for a foreign government to decide who or what should be the alternative for Iran. That’s up to the Iranian people.”

In the interviews, Pahlavi did not directly address Trump’s post about blasting Iran back to the Stone Ages but stressed, as he has in the past, that military strikes should “hit the regime as hard as you can” but spare “civilian infrastructure.”

Speaking about his own movement, Pahlavi unequivocally condemned violence by his more radical supporters and said he has worked hard to unify the Iranian opposition, gathering together representatives “from all walks of life, ideologies. In fact, I’ve reached out to people who were, at the time, my father’s worst enemies. Today, they are fully on board working with me.”

Pahlavi said his critics “are entitled to their opinion. Some people may not like my face. Some people may think that I should be doing this and that,” he said. But, he added, “I think for the most part, I’m enjoying a lot of support across the board, inside and outside of Iran.”

Some of that support, he acknowledged, comes from his family legacy: “Yes, I happen to have the Pahlavi name. And by the way, that’s a positive. That’s what people are chanting on the streets.”

While........

© The Times of Israel