Iran is in the grip of a nationwide uprising that strikes at the survival of the regime itself – and much of the Western press has responded by looking away, minimizing its significance, or misrepresenting its meaning.
After initially ignoring the eruption of protests, left-leaning outlets that make up the so-called prestige press began to acknowledge the outpouring of unrest. But in the crucial early days, coverage was often buried or distorted – framed as economic dissatisfaction rather than what it plainly was: open, mass defiance of the Islamist dictatorship and an unmistakable demand for its end.
This should not surprise anyone. For decades, much of the liberal press has treated Islamist rule in Iran as permanent and reformable, while dismissing openly anti-Islamist Iranians as marginal or unrepresentative.
One of the most politically inconvenient facts for liberal media outlets has been the support that demonstrators have been showing for Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. In city after city, demonstrators are openly chanting the name of the late Shah’s 65-year-old son – who lives in the United States – and waving Iran’s pre‑1979 lion‑and‑sun flag as their primary symbol of defiance. That banner has now reappeared not only in exile rallies from London to Washington but, far more significantly, in clandestine videos from inside Iran itself, where displaying monarchist symbols or calling for the regime’s overthrow is a capital offense.
Media reluctance to dwell on this monarchist current – on the fact that Iranians are risking execution not for an abstract reform agenda but to signal support for the ousted dynasty and the abolition of the Islamic Republic – amounts, in practice, to an erasure of one of the uprising’s most remarkable features, one that strikes at the foundations of liberal thinking about Iran.
Editors, writers, foreign correspondents and columnists – and elite university academicians – on the left side of the political spectrum have labored in the face of obvious reality to sell Western audiences a comforting myth of “moderate Islamism,” endlessly searching for partners in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Iran’s so‑called reformist factions while showing scant interest in supporting staunchly secular Muslims.
Barack Obama’s 2009 Cairo address to “the Muslim world” – replete with reverent references to “the Holy Koran” – was the purest expression of this worldview at the Presidential level. From the moment he first entered the White House, Obama aimed to align American foreign policy with what he perceived as an unstoppable Islamist tide.
That same milieu now finds itself intellectually disarmed by millions of Iranians who want to end, not reform, the monstrous mullahcracy. An anti‑theocratic revolt does not fit a narrative built on “moderate” mullahs, “moderate” Islamists, and technocratic tinkering within permanent clerical fascist rule.
Like their Cold War predecessors who were stunned by the sudden Soviet crackup, the liberal intellectual class is imprisoned by a narrative that rules out the possibility of Islamist regime change. So, they keep missing the moments when people on the ground refuse to accept that premise. In so doing, liberals help to normalize medieval madness and barbarism.
To begin to understand how the Iranian regime came to power – and how it survived for nearly half a century despite its monstrous brutality and ideological extremism – we must return to a moment of deliberate American choice, when the Carter administration, amplified by an admiring liberal press, cravenly abandoned Iran’s modernizing monarch and cynically sought to accommodate and even leverage Islamist forces as a supposed counterweight to Soviet influence.
The betrayal was stunning and swift.
On New Year’s Eve 1977, Jimmy Carter toasted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Tehran, calling Iran “an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world,” a line that perfectly captured how central the oil-rich, non-Arab country had become to U.S. strategy. Iran under the Pahlavi monarchy was Washington’s strategic ally and Israel’s quiet partner. The monarchy bought U.S. weapons, held the Soviet Union at bay, shipped oil to Israel via the Eilat–Ashkelon pipeline, and shared intelligence with Israel against radical Arab regimes and the PLO.
Yet less than a year later, when the Shah and Empress Farah paid a state visit to Washington in November 1977, his arrival at the White House turned into a made‑for‑television humiliation. Police used teargas to break up violent clashes between pro‑ and anti‑Shah demonstrators along Pennsylvania Avenue, and the gas blew back toward the reviewing stand, forcing the royal couple to wipe away tears as they tried to maintain composure on live television – an image that undermined the Shah at home and grotesquely foreshadowed what was to come.
As terrorism and unrest in Iran spread in 1978, Carter’s team increasingly treated the Shah as a disposable embarrassment rather than a strategic ally. Ambassador William Sullivan in Tehran cabled Washington that “the Shah is doomed” and began pressing for a transition in which the monarchy would be eased aside and some version of a so-called moderate Islamic leadership would be allowed to take charge.
Carter publicly hectored the Shah on human rights while privately signaling that Washington would not back a decisive use of force to restore order – pressing the palace to compromise just as the revolutionary tide was cresting.
Taking their cues from the White House, liberal journalists mocked the Shah when he warned that he faced an “unholy alliance” of clergy and Communists – an accurate description of the coalition that toppled him before the dominant and more disciplined Islamists devoured the Marxists and other leftwing factions.
On January 3, 1979, the White House dispatched Gen. Robert Huyser, the deputy NATO commander, on a hastily organized mission to Tehran. Officially, Huyser was there to keep the Iranian armed forces united and deter possible Soviet intervention. In practice, he paralyzed the military.
As Khomeini’s network systematically dismantled the monarchy’s authority, Carter’s emissary urged the men in uniform not to move against the revolutionaries, to avoid bloodshed, and to prepare to work with whatever “national unity” government emerged.
The “Huyser Mission,” as it came to be known, was a manifestation of the strategy of Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who believed political Islam represented a potent force that could be harnessed and manipulated to weaken the Soviet Union. Exactly six months after ordering Huyser to depart for Iran, Carter, at Brzezinski’s urging, signed the first directive for secret aid to Islamist insurgents in Afghanistan.
The Shah himself would later write that U.S. policy seemed more concerned with the timing of his exit from Iran than with saving his throne. In December 1979, already in exile and dying of cancer, he openly accused the Carter administration of having helped “prepare the downfall” of his regime and of trying in vain to win over the revolutionaries who were about to turn Iran into an implacable enemy of the United States and the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism.
The administration’s willful romanticization of Iran’s new ruler, Ayatollah Khomeini, reached an absurd peak in the words of Andrew Young, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In February 1979, just after Khomeini’s return to Iran, Young described him as “a saint,” praising Islam as a “vibrant” force for social justice and suggesting that Westerners simply did not understand the new melding of religion and politics.
In that outrageous phrase – “a saint” – Young gave a kind of benediction to a man who had already made clear in his writings that he viewed democracy as a heresy and even regarded the nation‑state of Iran as expendable if its demise advanced the global cause of radical Islam.
Forced out of Iran in 1964, Khomeini spent roughly 15 years in exile, living successively in Turkey, Iraq, and France. French government willingness to host Khomeini in late 1978 was widely read at the time as an attempt to “moderate” him and his movement, or at least to keep a useful channel open.
In fact, it was another example of a Western nation undermining – and ultimately betraying – an ally.
Under the Shah, France and Iran had close political, economic, and industrial ties. Allowing Khomeini to set up his headquarters in a French village gave him an international platform to promote and coordinate his revolution. For the first time during his exile, he enjoyed near‑total freedom to meet journalists, record statements, and communicate by telephone and cassette tapes with clandestine networks inside Iran.
Fawning global media coverage turned Khomeini into the visible face of the opposition, allowing him to shape the revolutionary narrative to both Iranian and Western audiences in a way that had not been possible during his earlier exile.
The extremist cleric soon proved just how badly Washington and Paris had misread him. Within months of returning to Iran, he purged secular opponents, executed officials and allies of the old regime, created and empowered the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and announced that Iran would export its revolution to the entire world, with Israel and the U.S. as primary targets.
Andy Young’s “saint” quickly became the patron of terror groups, the inciter of assassinations abroad, and the architect of a regional “axis of resistance” that has been murdering Americans and Jews overseas ever since.
The most dramatic symbol of Carter’s catastrophic Iran policy was the U.S. Embassy takeover in Tehran. On November 4, radical “students” stormed the Embassy, seized 66 Americans, and quickly reduced the number of hostages to 52 whom the regime would hold for 444 days, parading them in front of cameras and forcing them to deliver coerced “confessions.”
Carter’s failed helicopter commando rescue attempt ended in April 1980 with mechanical failures, a deadly collision in the Iranian desert, and eight dead U.S. servicemen, underscoring American impotence and further emboldening Tehran. The hostages were finally released on January 20, 1981 – minutes after Ronald Reagan took the oath of office – another calculated humiliation designed to show that the Islamic Republic could dictate the terms on which America got its people back.
The regime’s terror was not confined to Iran’s borders. On July 22, 1980, Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a former press attaché at the Iranian embassy in Washington under the Shah and a prominent exile critic of Khomeini, opened the door of his home in Bethesda, Maryland and was shot dead by Dawud Salahuddin (David Belfield), an American convert to Islam working with an Iran‑linked group.
Salahuddin, who later admitted that he carried out the assassination as a revolutionary “act of war,” fled the United States on forged documents, reached the Iranian embassy in Geneva, received a visa, and has lived openly in Iran ever since, even appearing in an Iranian film – an American‑born murderer turned regime asset.
One of the Islamist regime’s first symbolic acts was to break with Israel and embrace the Palestinian cause in its most radical form. After the revolution, Iran cut all ties with Israel, turned the former Israeli embassy in Tehran over to the PLO, and made hatred of the Jewish state a central pillar of its foreign policy. Yasser Arafat was among the first foreign leaders to visit Tehran after the monarchy fell, and for a time the new regime cultivated the PLO even as it prepared to build more directly Iranian‑controlled instruments in Lebanon and beyond.
Hezbollah emerged out of that strategy. In the early 1980s, the IRGC sent some 1,500 Guardsmen to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, where they trained Shiite militants, organized attacks on Western and Israeli targets, and midwifed the creation of Hezbollah as a disciplined Islamist movement explicitly loyal to Khomeini’s doctrine of clerical rule. Hezbollah became, in effect, Iran’s first full‑fledged foreign legion: funded with hundreds of millions of dollars a year, armed with Iranian weapons, and tasked with serving as the vanguard of the “axis of resistance” on Israel’s northern border.
In Gaza, the Iranian regime shifted over time from backing PLO‑style secular nationalism to the regime’s preferred brand of Islamist rejectionism. After Hamas was founded in 1987, Tehran quickly saw the Sunni Islamist group’s potential as a Sunni counterpart to Hezbollah: committed to Israel’s destruction, willing to bridge the theological divide and work with Shia Iran for money and arms.
By the early 1990s, Iran was promising Hamas tens of millions of dollars annually, and helping to provide training through the IRGC and Hezbollah. By the 2000s, U.S. and Israeli assessments put Iranian aid to Hamas in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
Farther south, Iran cultivated the Houthis in Yemen as yet another piece on the regional chessboard. Houthi leaders received religious and political training in Iran in the 1990s. By 2009, Tehran was providing direct military and financial support to the Houthis, and after they seized Sanaa in 2014, Iranian aid escalated into the transfer of advanced missiles, drones, and training by the Quds Force and Hezbollah cadres.
The result has been a militia that fires Iranian‑designed projectiles at Saudi cities and, more recently, at Eilat and Israeli and Western shipping in the Red Sea and Bab el‑Mandeb, disrupting global trade.
What tied Iran’s proxies together was the Islamic Republic’s long‑term strategy: surround Israel with ideological clients, bleed America and its allies, and keep the region in a state of permanent low‑grade conflict.
If Jimmy Carter’s sin was to abandon a pro‑Western leader in the hope of currying favor with Khomeini, Barack Obama’s was to believe that the same revolutionary regime could be mollified through a narrow nuclear deal. From his earliest letters to Khomeini’s successor as Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and his 2009 Cairo speech, Obama framed engagement with Iran as a moral and strategic imperative. By 2015, this translated into the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which lifted sanctions, released tens of billions of dollars, and accepted sunset clauses on key restrictions in exchange for temporary limits on enrichment.
The JCPOA left Iran’s missile program untouched, granted only limited and delayed access to suspect military sites, and did nothing to constrain Iran’s sponsorship of Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, or Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria. The years after the deal saw Iran deepen its entrenchment in Syria, expand missile and rocket stocks for its proxies, and continue to use the IRGC’s Quds Force to arm and train them.
The financial relief that the regime received was staggering.
In January 2016, the Obama administration settled a pre‑revolution arms dispute by paying Iran $1.7 billion. Because of banking sanctions, the entire amount was delivered in non‑U.S. currency as physical cash. Separate from the cash pallets, the nuclear deal’s implementation unlocked tens of billions in frozen Iranian assets held abroad.
The Biden administration materially benefited the regime by tolerating a large surge in oil exports and by unfreezing billions of dollars in restricted funds as part of a 2023 prisoner deal. These steps expanded Iran’s hard‑currency access even as it intensified regional aggression and nuclear escalation.
U.S. Energy Information Administration data, summarized by outside analysts, indicate Iran earned about $144 billion dollars from petroleum exports in 2021–2023, roughly $100 billion more than in the last two years of the first Trump administration, reflecting a major rebound in sanctioned oil sales. Most shipments went to China through a “dark fleet” that operated with limited U.S. interdiction until late‑term crackdowns.
Biden also authorized $6 billion in prisoner‑swap funds. In September 2023, his administration agreed to a deal under which about $6 billion dollars in Iranian funds frozen in South Korean banks were transferred to restricted accounts in Qatar, with formal assurances the money would be used only for “humanitarian” purposes. Contrary to administration claims of tight controls, the windfall freed up other regime resources for use by the IRGC, Hamas, and Hezbollah.
Biden bet heavily on indirect talks aimed at restoring or supplementing Obama’s nuclear deal, signaling willingness to relax some sanctions and accept informal Iranian assurances on enrichment and regional behavior rather than enforcing maximum economic pressure.
For the U.S. it became a losing strategy of de-escalation in exchange for cash. Iran dialed nuclear or regional provocations up and down while securing de facto financial breathing room and avoiding the kind of oil‑export squeeze that had previously strained its budget.
The core concept was “engagement – prioritization by a series of Democrat Presidents of negotiated restraints over ongoing pressure. Although Bill Clinton, for example, expanded targeted sanctions and designated Iran a state sponsor of terrorism, his administration also explored engagement and gestures toward détente.
Donald Trump’s approach to Iran represents a deliberate break with the Democrats’ failed model: no engagement track, no sanctions relief, and no regime enrichment of an enemy through cash airlifts or asset transfers. Instead, Trump’s record includes: withdrawal from the JCPOA; a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign that crushed Iran’s oil revenues; formal terrorist designation of the IRGC; killing IRGC chief Qassem Soleimani; military strikes that severely damaged Iran’s nuclear infrastructure; and unprecedented statements of support for Iranians fighting in the streets for their freedom.
And now, less than a month after deposing Venezuela’s radical left dictator – who had allowed Iran and Hezbollah to establish espionage and terrorist bases inside his country – President Trump has a historic opportunity to help free Iran from tyranny and terror. His legacy could well include recognition as Iran’s liberator, further cementing his achievements in transforming the Middle East. A post-Islamist Iran that redirects resources inward and normalizes ties with its neighbors, including Israel, will strip Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis of their primary state sponsor.
The Crown Prince has floated the idea of a “Cyrus Accord” as a framework for full diplomatic relations and strategic cooperation between a future democratic Iran and Israel, explicitly modeled on the Abraham Accords. Drawing on Cyrus the Great’s role in ending the Babylonian exile and authorizing the Jewish return to Zion and rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, the proposal envisions Iran aligning with Israel and Arab states on energy, water, technology, and regional security, effectively redrawing the strategic map of the Middle East.