As we speak, Iran and its people live in danger from day to day. The danger comes from external forces, from those who have never had cause to sympathise with the policies and politics of the ayatollahs who have governed the country since 1979. In the West, there are worries, and sometimes for good reason, about the way the authorities in Tehran have been handling the protests that have been ravaging the country.
The protests have legitimately been about rising prices and inflation, about Iranians’ need for a life free of the ailments which undermine social structures. But note how swiftly these protests have been manipulated into a situation where the detractors of the regime have begun demanding the overthrow of the ayatollahs. That these demands are being fomented from abroad -- listen to Donald Trump assuring the protesters that help is on the way -- is a sordid fact coming through clearly in the responses of western governments to the crisis.
The worry for the world as well as for Iranians is etched out there in broad outlines. It is regime change that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are looking to. Coming only days after the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and at a time when Washington continues hurling threats at Colombia and Cuba and vows to seize Greenland from Denmark, the goals of outside forces in Iran are only too obvious. The long arm of conspiracy fanned from abroad and put into practice at home is doing what has been done to other nations in recent times.
Washington and Tel Aviv have already broken international law through their bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in the middle of last year. It is therefore hard to discount the possibility that they will strike again and go into foisting on Iranians a regime that will be at the beck and call of those who could smash the regime of the ayatollahs.
It will then be for Iranians to become helpless and mute witnesses to a ravishing and ravaging of their country through intrigue that will have Iran biting the dust. It is for reasons of their proud history, for reasons of the truth that Iranian civilisation goes back millennia that the country and its heritage must be saved from foreign aggression or from foreign agents.
That Iran has been governed by the ayatollahs in harsh manner is not to be denied, indeed is condemned. That democratic behaviour has not been demonstrated by the Islamic leadership in all these decades it has held sway in Tehran is a truth no one denies. Women have not been treated well by the regime. Dissidence has regularly been stamped out. Political prisoners have languished in incarceration for years, sometimes for decades.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his team have never entertained thoughts of a liberal opening in the country. It is these realities the regime must take into account and move fast into rolling them back. Shooting protesters does not help, especially when every instance of firing into the crowds becomes ammunition for foreign powers and their agents to deepen and heighten a conflagration burning up a country.
Iran is in deep trouble. Right now it is caught in an existential crisis. Just how deep this crisis is can be gauged from the new ambitions of the country’s overthrown royal family. The irony is not to be missed. It was in January 1979 that the Shah left his country in the face of nationwide protests against his authoritarian and corrupt monarchy.
In January 2026, his son, the former crown prince, 65-year old Reza Pahlavi is elated at the chaos unfolding in Tehran. He would like to take charge of the country, as its new Shah. The question which, therefore, is now before the world relates to the guarantees he might have had about a restoration of the monarchy from his friends in the West.
It will be a disaster for the Pahlavis to be restored to power. What Iran needs now is a democratic opening, inaugurated by the ayatollahs, that will go into a consolidation of the revolution brought about in 1979. The fall of the Shah in that year was a vindication of Iranians’ desire for a country free of a cabal that was beholden to the West, that had been imposed on Iran by the likes of Kermit Roosevelt in 1953.
America’s CIA engineered the return of the Shah, who had fled into exile when nationalist forces led by Mohamed Mossadegh took over the country and went into a welcome spate of a nationalisation of local resources. In other words, Mossadegh’s revolution gave Iran back to its people. Intrigue in Washington put paid to that achievement.
In early 1979, for all the academic arguments which might be proffered about the uprising against the Shah having been commandeered by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his followers, the fact remains that the Islamic Revolution was one more brilliant instance of an Iran reclaimed by its people.
Of course the ayatollahs committed excesses; of course the killings of the Shah’s loyalists such as Amir Abbas Hoveyda were an outrage; of course the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran was an embarrassment that tarnished the reputations of the clerics running the country. All of these are facts of history and will and must in future be analysed by scholars and researchers.
But the larger truth about the 1979 revolution must not be brushed aside. The Shah’s departure and flight into exile were a new break of dawn for Iran’s people. In these decades since, Iran’s sovereignty and self-esteem have accorded to its people a high perch in the global community.
It is a national reputation which must not be marred by the dark activities of those calling unashamedly for the son of the late Shah to take charge of Iran or for the ayatollahs to fall. The misdeeds of the fallen monarchy have not been forgotten. The genuflection of the discredited monarchy to the West remains a blot on Iran’s history.
Which is why it is imperative for Iranians to hold fast to their principles. Which is why it is important for Iran’s enemies to bear in mind that a military assault on Iran or causing subversion from within will lead to conditions that will destabilise not just the region but the globe as a whole. On the survival of Iran depends the survival of nations now in the crosshairs of men dispensing with a rules-based world order and opting for 19th century gunboat politics.
Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics and international affairs.
