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As the world continues to wait to see what President Donald Trump will do regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran, the ruling elites in Tehran are taking his failure to act up to now as an indication of his cowardice and weakness, and are speaking and acting accordingly.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), reported that on Feb. 11, General Mohammad Reza Naghdi, senior advisor to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps top dog, crowed that “even if the United States deploys all of its 12 aircraft carriers near us, it won’t be able to do a damn thing. America has certainly been defeated and is incapable of any aggression. Therefore, it should focus on its own domestic affairs. It should complete the deployment [of the National Guard] in its own states.”
Naghdi added: “America is already drowning in frustration and global humiliation. The U.S. President is currently mired in the Epstein corruption scandal. Also, America’s relations with its closest allies, like Canada and Europe have deteriorated to a level that is on the brink of war. The United States is finished.”
Or maybe it is the Islamic Republic of Iran that is finished. The Iranian people widely hate the Islamic Republic, with a disgust so deep that it has led many of them to turn against Islam itself: in June 2020, a research organization, the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in IRAN (GAMAAN), conducted an anonymous online survey on religious views in Iran after forty years of Islamic rule. Nearly 40,000 Iranians participated.
The survey organizers reported that while Iran is officially over 99% Muslim, only 40% of the Iranians who participated in this anonymous survey said that they were Muslim. After forty years of strict Islamic rule, Iranians were so far from thinking that it was the solution for society’s ills that massive numbers of them didn’t identify as Muslim at all.
Meanwhile, several times over the last few years, Iranians in massive numbers have risked imprisonment and torture by chanting the praises of Reza Shah, the shah of Iran from 1925 to 1941 and father of the shah whom Jimmy Carter betrayed and abandoned. This is just one among a number of indications that the biggest fear of those who warn against regime change, that it will lead to anarchy and civil war, are overlooking or ignoring the fact that Iran has someone who can immediately step into the power vacuum that the mullahs will create when the Islamic Republic finally keeps its appointment with the dustbin of history: the son of the deposed shah, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi.
As the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin observed in Aug. 2025, “of all Iranian diaspora leaders, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the ousted shah, has the greatest legitimacy. He has name recognition, and even those Iranians who supported the 1979 Islamic Revolution look upon the monarchy as the golden age before sanctions, war, and corruption hobbled the country.”
Even better, the crown prince has indicated that he is ready not to take power as a new autocrat, but to lead a caretaker government until the Iranian people choose the government they prefer.
While he has rivals who also wish to lead a post-Islamic Republic Iran, his openness to being only a temporary leader until the Iranians determine the direction of their nation leaves the door open for everyone in a way that other contenders do not. And Reza Pahlavi is also the only would-be Iranian leader who has the stature and the name recognition to unite the various factions of the embattled and largely clandestine Iranian opposition.
Maybe Trump’s decision last June to stop short and leave the Islamic Republic in place was not the best one. At this point, one hopes that the Trump administration is exploring all possible avenues to aid the crown prince and others who want to see an end to the Islamic Republic, as the Iranian people, much as they detest the regime, are suffering too comprehensively from its tyranny for an effective opposition to emerge within the country.
Those people have suffered under the Islamic Republic for 47 years. It’s much more than enough. Before the Islamic Republic makes good on its ongoing threats to other countries, the nations of what used to be known as the free world ought to be helping the Iranian people make the final push to topple this evil regime.
