Strange to think, but there was a time when the United States’ most steadfast ally in the Middle East was Iran. In 1953, the C.I.A. had backed a coup that ousted Mohammad Mossadegh, the popular Prime Minister, and restored power to the monarchy of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah. For a quarter of a century thereafter, Washington watched in satisfaction as the Shah kept the peace while a U.S.-dominated consortium sold off Iran’s oil.
There was rather a lot of oil, making the Shah one of the world’s wealthiest men. For his forty-eighth birthday, in 1967, he staged a glitzy coronation for himself. Standing before a golden throne, he steadied onto his head a crown rimed with 3,380 diamonds. His third wife, Empress Farah, processed in a bejewelled, mink-edged Christian Dior cloak that took eight attendants to carry. After the ceremony, the royal couple waved stiffly to the crowds from a horse-drawn gilded carriage that had been crafted in Vienna by one of Europe’s last remaining coach-makers. Planes dropped 17,532 roses, one for each glorious day of the Shah’s glorious life.
Iran’s display of floral ballistics hinted at another beneficiary of its oil revenues: the military. In 1972, President Richard Nixon gave the Shah carte blanche to buy any arms he desired short of nuclear bombs. The Shah amassed the world’s fifth-largest military, his toy chest brimming with supersonic jets, laser-guided bombs, and helicopter gunships. Reportedly, he relaxed by reading arms catalogues.
A fair assessment would have conceded that not all Iranians shared the Shah’s purring contentment. Liberals sought rights, Communists sought revolution, and clerics wanted a restoration of their power. One ayatollah in particular, Ruhollah Khomeini, needled the Shah incessantly. In 1967, he condemned the coronation. In 1971, when the Shah staged an even more expensive celebration to honor twenty-five hundred years of monarchy in Iran, Khomeini declared that to attend the “abominable festival” would be “to participate in the murder of the oppressed people of Iran.”
This was more annoying than intimidating, though. Khomeini, by then an old man, inveighed against the Shah from Najaf, Iraq, because he hadn’t been allowed in Iran since 1964. Iran’s secret police force, SAVAK, known for its use of torture, had effectively cleared the country of the most vocal dissidents. By the seventies, opposition leaders were generally behind bars or in exile, with few replacements stepping forth.
If anything, the Shah’s grip appeared to be strengthening. In 1975, he abolished Iran’s two permitted political parties and established a single one in their place, which every adult was required to join. All public buildings and many homes displayed the Shah’s portrait. You couldn’t throw a stone without hitting one, the joke went—though you’d be arrested if you did.
At a New Year’s Eve celebration in Tehran in 1977, President Jimmy Carter made a toast. “There is no other head of state with whom I feel on friendlier terms,” Carter said. In a troublesome region, Iran was an “island of stability.”
Predictably, Khomeini fulminated about Carter’s visit. Iran’s leading afternoon newspaper, Etalaat, struck back with an accusatory editorial, prepared by the government and likely at the Shah’s behest. Khomeini was simultaneously the agent of Communists and of reactionaries, the editorial charged. He had ties to India, and possibly to British imperialists. Or perhaps, the paper insinuated, he was a sensitive soul who’d written love poetry in his youth. (Perhaps he was. After Khomeini’s death, his followers were dumbfounded by the publication of “The Wine of Love,” a collection of his mystical poems. “Release me from these countless pains,” one goes, “from a heart cut in pieces and a breast pierced like a kebab.”)
The Shah had attacked from a position of apparent strength. “My power, both under law and due to the special spiritual link that I have with my people, is at its highest peak,” he boasted in the month that the editorial was published. The peak, and also the precipice. After the editorial appeared, on January 7, 1978, seminarians incensed by the slander of Khomeini staged large demonstrations in Qom. The police opened fire, killing some. It didn’t seem like a huge deal. Yet somehow the unrest continued, increased, and in thirteen months brought the Shah’s regime crashing down. A Khomeini-led Islamic state rose in its stead.
In a timely new book, “King of Kings” (Doubleday), the reporter Scott Anderson discusses Etalaat’s editorial in a chapter titled “The Butterfly Effect.” Like the fabled butterfly wing flap that causes a hurricane, it split the heavens and loosed a revolutionary deluge that transformed the Middle East. If “events had played out just a little differently,” Anderson asks, might the Iranian Revolution have never happened?
Tiny causes with huge effects have long been intriguing. The seventeenth-century mathematician Blaise Pascal offered the example of Cleopatra’s nose. Had it been a different size, the Roman general Mark Antony might not have loved Cleopatra, sided with her, lost the Battle of Actium, and inadvertently caused Rome’s transformation from republic to empire. (Interestingly, in Pascal’s “unattractive Cleopatra” scenario, her nose was too small, Pascal apparently having been something of a nose man.) Change Cleopatra’s face and you change the face of history.
What-if scenarios seize the imagination when immense power is held by a single person. In the early nineteenth century, no figure held so much as Napoleon Bonaparte. After his defeat, his adopted son Louis-Napoleon Geoffroy wrote a book imagining a world in which Napoleon’s Russian invasion hadn’t failed. Napoleon would have taken Asia, Africa, and the Americas, Geoffroy hypothesized, uniting the world under one ruler. Geoffroy’s book was the “first recognizable full-length, speculative, alternative history,” the historian Richard J. Evans observes. It started a long fascination with counterfactuals: what if Adolf Hitler hadn’t been born, J.F.K. hadn’t been killed, or, as “Saturday Night Live” once asked, Napoleon had had a B-52?
Such thought experiments delight in the notion that certain individuals can dramatically reroute history. The less fun notion is that they can’t, and that major events have major causes. The modern discipline of history cut its teeth on the Napoleon question. On the one hand, he represented a modernization process that clearly transcended any single person. On the other, the fate of that process seemed to hang on Napoleon, a changeable man who was nearly assassinated several times.
Hegel sought to square this circle. History progresses according to a grand logic, he proposed, but “world-historical individuals” channel that logic as the agents of destiny. In 1806, when Hegel was living in Jena and putting the final touches on his masterwork, “The Phenomenology of Spirit,” Napoleon arrived with his troops. “I saw the Emperor—this world-soul,” Hegel breathlessly wrote. It was a “wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.” The next day, Napoleon decimated the Prussian military, ending any hope of restoring the Holy Roman Empire. Although Napoleon’s troops ransacked Hegel’s home and burned his neighbors’ houses, Hegel couldn’t help but admire the spirit of history and his horse.
In “War and Peace” (1869), Leo Tolstoy dismissed the great-man theory of the Napoleonic Wars. He argued in an epilogue that to ascribe historical agency to figures like Napoleon was akin to seeing a herd of cattle and concluding that the cow in front must be in charge. Social forces, not men on horseback, decide the fate of nations, Tolstoy felt. The conservative writer Niall Ferguson credits his decision to become a historian to reading Tolstoy’s epilogue. “I remember thinking that can’t be right,” he has said. “There is and must be a role for individual agency, for Napoleon, for Hitler.”
Ferguson, who has published a collection of counterfactual histories, is an outlier among academics. Perhaps their leftward leanings lead them, like Tolstoy, to downplay the ability of individuals to alter their own fates. (The Marxist historian E. P. Thompson dismissed what-if speculations as “Geschichtenscheissenschlopff, unhistorical shit.”) Either way, the scholarly tendency has been to devalue choice and chance as historical factors. Wars and revolutions might feel chaotic, but they happen for reasons rooted in economics, ideology, geography, and climate. The doings of generals, in this view, are froth on the waves.
Yet, even for those skilled at finding deeper causes behind events, Iran is a hard case. Any sense that history trends in a general direction—toward freedom, perhaps, or toward rights, markets, secularism, or science—is confounded by a large, prosperous country becoming a hard-line semi-theocracy. The philosopher Michel Foucault relished the Iranian Revolution’s perversity: it was “perhaps the greatest ever insurrection against global systems, the most insane and the most modern form of revolt.”
But why Iran? In Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution had been preceded by two smaller revolutions. Mao Zedong, before his own revolution prevailed, described China as dry tinder awaiting a spark. Few observers saw Iran that way. The factors that in hindsight might explain the country’s abrupt upheaval—its swift economic growth followed by a downturn, its rapid urbanization, its authoritarianism, its corruption—were fairly normal. Even as a large Muslim autocracy in the Middle East weathering the boom and bust of the oil market, Iran wasn’t unique. Why did a revolution occur there but not in Iraq or Saudi Arabia?
“The closer one examines it,” Anderson writes, “the more mysterious and implausible it all seems.” One of the best books on the topic, “The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran” (2004), by the sociologist Charles Kurzman, considers various explanations but rejects them all in favor of an “anti-explanation,” dwelling on the Revolution’s anomalousness. Gary Sick, who oversaw Iranian affairs at the National Security Council under Carter, sees it similarly. “I’ve studied this thing for the past forty years,” he told Anderson, “and it still doesn’t fully make sense to me.” Could one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century have simply been an accident?
One reason to think so, Anderson argues, is the “remarkably small number of principal actors involved”: the Shah, Ruhollah Khomeini, and Jimmy Carter. All had considerable blind spots, and none took counsel from more than a few advisers. Their actions were idiosyncratic, often improvised.
Carter was the least informed. As is typical for U.S. Presidents, he faced a situation over which he held great power but to which he gave little attention. Carter took five months to select an Ambassador to Iran and another two to get him confirmed. For a surprisingly long time, Carter’s Iran policy functioned on autopilot, which meant selling weapons and declining to ask questions. It wasn’t until November, 1978, the eleventh month of the uprisings, that Carter began holding high-level meetings on Iran.
Carter had campaigned on human rights, which he described as “the soul of our foreign policy.” We now know that he didn’t want to pressure Iran about rights, but the Shah, engaging in preëmptive compliance, loosened political restrictions anyway. The Shah’s opponents took Carter’s speeches as reassurance that they’d be protected. As a leading reformer, the engineering professor Mehdi Bazargan, explained, “All the built-up pressure exploded.” For a pre-revolutionary season in 1977, liberals signed letters and staged poetry readings that criticized the government in increasingly frank terms.
In late 1977, when it was clear that Carter wouldn’t press the issue of human rights, the Shah reversed course and cracked down again. Still, there had been a noticeable wobble in his legitimacy. Without realizing, Carter might have kicked a rock that, months later, caused an avalanche.
The Shah could have shored things up. Anderson notes that his closest confidant, Asadollah Alam, had a firm grasp on popular grievances and the need to address them. But Alam was dying of cancer and resigned before the unrest began. That left the Shah to rely for advice on his wife, Farah, whose knowledge of the situation wasn’t extensive. In May, 1978, long after the first unrest in Qom, Farah seemed not to have even heard of the ayatollah who was fomenting rebellion from Iraq. “For heaven’s sake,” she reportedly asked, “who is this Khomeini?”
Getting advice was one problem— taking it another. Unbeknownst to nearly everyone, the Shah also had cancer. (He would die in 1980.) This could explain why he seemed chronically overwhelmed, unsure whether to suppress dissent or to allow it. His haphazard directives combined the worst of both options: soldiers often let demonstrators march but occasionally shot up crowds, supplying fresh outrages that fuelled more protest.
Onlookers urged firmness. “Shoot the first man in front,” the former governor of California, Ronald Reagan, advised. “The rest will fall into line.” In a wonderfully rich account of the Pahlavi regime’s collapse, “The Fall of Heaven” (2016), Andrew Scott Cooper describes a telephone call that Iraq’s President, Saddam Hussein, placed to the Shah in August, 1978. “This mullah, Khomeini, is causing problems for you, and for me, and for all of us,” Saddam reportedly said. Would it be O.K. to kill him? Saddam stayed on the line while the Shah consulted the Prime Minister and the SAVAK director, who lobbed the decision back to him. The Shah told Saddam to stand down.
Anderson’s third principal, Khomeini, was an unlikely leader. He was a scholar of Islamic law in his late seventies who hadn’t set foot in Iran for nearly fifteen years. His relevance had been waning until October, 1977, when his son Mostafa suddenly died. The causes were likely natural, Anderson suggests, but Iranians blamed SAVAK. Mostafa’s death returned the exiled ayatollah to the public eye; Khomeini called it “God’s hidden providence.”
One might see Khomeini as a Hegelian agent of destiny through whom historical forces acted. If so, though, he wasn’t a witting one. Khomeini had sharp instincts, but his comprehension of politics was warped by paranoid fantasies about Jews, Baha’is, Freemasons, and the “satanic superpowers.” His fellow opposition leader, the liberal Mehdi Bazargan, expressed astonishment at Khomeini’s “heedlessness of the obvious problems of politics and administration.” Khomeini had launched his anti-Shah campaign “without any plan,” Bazargan observed. “I even wonder if he had any inkling that he was starting a revolution.”
Rebellion crescendoed throughout 1978, prompting the Shah to institute martial law in twelve cities on September 8th. That day, now known as Black Friday, soldiers fired on a large demonstration, killing two or three hundred people. Perhaps, had things gone differently, this could have been avoided—if Carter’s Iran policy had been more considered, if the Shah and his most perceptive adviser hadn’t both been dying of cancer, if a son’s death hadn’t made Khomeini a resistance icon, if Saddam had killed Khomeini in August. But by autumn Iran was slipping from the Shah’s grasp. “For fifteen years everything I picked up turned to gold,” he reflected. “Now every time I pick up gold it turns to shit.”
The Shah, looking exhausted, gave a perplexing speech on television on November 6th. “I cannot but approve of your revolution,” he said. “In these moments of rising against foreign domination, tyranny, and corruption, I stand by your side.” It was an awkward attempt to co-opt the uprising, and it failed pitifully. Afterward, the U.S. Ambassador to Iran finally broached the topic of the Shah’s potential downfall in a long telegram titled “Thinking the Unthinkable.”
“King of Kings” is a lively tale of palace intrigue. Using almost exclusively English-language sources plus interviews (including with Empress Farah, who is still living), Anderson reconstructs the bumblings that upended Iran. But a revolution, unlike a coup, isn’t the work of individuals alone. It requires mass support. And, by the time it was over, Iran’s had drawn in two million people, a greater proportion of the population than any twentieth-century revolution theretofore.
It was a shock to see so many Iranians who had previously minded their own business—merchants, professionals, clerics, students, housewives—clash violently with police. The economist Timur Kuran explains this change as the consequence of “preference falsification.” Years of SAVAK surveillance had taught Iranians to conceal their grievances. Yet when a minor provocation—the publication of an editorial—shook things up, the discontent poured out. The more that people were exposed to their compatriots’ views, the more they shared their own, touching off a chain reaction of disclosure. Khomeini can be seen here as a catalyst. His exile, rather than marginalizing him, gave him the rare platform from which to speak forthrightly.
Preference falsification explains how a revolution could be both inevitable and unforeseeable. Subterranean pressures mount, unnoticed, until they erupt. If it hadn’t been Etalaat’s editorial, some other jostle would have released that stored political energy. The fact that the Revolution was unexpected—even by the revolutionaries themselves—doesn’t mean it was contingent.
Yet Kuran’s model of revolution as revelation presumes that people have stable preferences to reveal. Do they? Revolutions are unsettling affairs, Kurzman, the sociologist, notes. People don’t know how to act, so they take cues from their neighbors or react to their opponents. With everyone predicating their behavior on everyone else’s, norms shift rapidly, and complicated feedback effects ensue. Rebels aren’t surprised only by one another’s revealed desires, Kurzman maintains; they’re surprised by their own.
In “The Loneliest Revolution” (2023), the Iranian sociologist Ali Mirsepassi recounts, during his student days, standing nervously with his friend Hamid as a chanting crowd approached. Even being near a protest could mean prison. “I looked to Hamid and the rest of our group, our eyes scanning the others’ for an answer to what to do: run or join ranks,” he writes. Hamid suddenly shouted, “Free all political prisoners!,” and everyone followed. That was Mirsepassi’s first protest. By late 1978, he recalled, “the revolutionary crowd had attained a single will or soul.”
The crowd’s will mattered because the Revolution had no overarching organization. Rebellion spread more through graffiti, chants, and songs than through top-down orders. Wild rumors swirled about Baha’is poisoning the water, Israeli troops entering the country in disguise, and the Shah personally gunning down protesters from his helicopter. Khomeini tried to shape these unpredictable fluid dynamics, but his directives were often ignored. He was less a commander than an icon, an Islamic Che Guevara.
Khomeini sought to replace the monarchy with a religious state ruled by an Islamic jurist. He knew to soft-pedal that aim in interviews, though, since relatively few rebels initially shared it. (Even his fellow-ayatollahs didn’t all want a theocracy.) The streets belonged as much to students, feminists, merchants, liberals, and industrial workers as to clerics. One could find, among the opposition, hippies and Jews.
Khomeini’s vagueness was central to his leadership. Many who would have found his spelled-out vision repellent nevertheless accepted him as a figurehead. Probably they didn’t imagine an elderly theologian actually seizing the state. Either way, the Revolution found Communists and liberals following fundamentalists. “It seemed in no way a contradiction for me—an educated, professional woman—to back an opposition that cloaked its fight against real-life grievances under the mantle of religion,” the judge (and later the Nobel-winning democracy advocate) Shirin Ebadi recalled. “Who did I have more in common with, in the end: an opposition led by mullahs who spoke in the tones familiar to ordinary Iranians or the gilded court of the shah, whose officials cavorted with American starlets at parties soaked in expensive French champagne?”
Could those discordant elements cohere? In late 1978, Ali Mirsepassi spoke in favor of prolonging a university strike. Khomeini opposed this, Mirsepassi acknowledged, but who put Khomeini in charge? Mirsepassi won over his cheering audience, though he worried that he’d got “carried away” and been “excessively harsh” regarding the ayatollah. While leaving the event, he was stabbed twenty-one times. If there was contingency here, it was less the caprice of leaders than the volatility of crowds.
By 1979, as those crowds clamored for his death, the Shah prepared to flee. “Don’t pack too much,” he advised his valet. “It is just for a short period of time.” He appointed a new Prime Minister, placed him in charge, and took off for Egypt on January 16, 1979.
Khomeini returned from exile and announced a provisional government “based on the Sharia,” though with the liberal Mehdi Bazargan as Prime Minister. “Through the guardianship that I have from the holy lawgiver I hereby pronounce Bazargan as the Ruler,” Khomeini explained. “Since I have appointed him, he must be obeyed.”
If Khomeini’s announced government had the support of God, Iran’s still intact government had the world’s fifth-largest military. But the contagion of rebellion was spreading there, too. Desertions became so rampant that officers hesitated to have soldiers police crowds for fear that the soldiers would join the protesters. The Army fought for a few days, then abruptly gave up. Millions of Iranians, to their own shock, had caused the region’s most powerful regime to simply melt away. “Do you think we actually planned to have a revolution?” one of Khomeini’s confidants asked. “We were just as surprised as anyone.”
“Death to the Shah” had been the Revolution’s call, yet that said nothing about what would come next. The post-Shah state was a mishmash of neckties and turbans, with Bazargan as Prime Minister and Khomeini hovering somewhere above. “You often don’t even know who’s directing traffic,” Bazargan complained.
Khomeini exploited this uncertainty. He moved like “a bulldozer crushing rocks, roots, and stones in his path,” Bazargan felt. A military organization created by Khomeini, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and cleric-controlled “committees” patrolled the streets, making arrests, confiscating property, and executing suspected enemies of the Revolution. In this feverish climate, Khomeini acquired a momentum that his non-clerical comrades hadn’t foreseen and couldn’t match.
In October, 1979, Jimmy Carter reluctantly allowed the ailing Shah to enter the United States for medical care. A week later, Bazargan was photographed shaking hands with Carter’s national-security adviser at an event they were both attending in Algeria. These events suggested to some a Shah-Carter-Bazargan axis of imperialism. Militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took hostages. Khomeini initially disapproved and directed Iran’s foreign minister, Ebrahim Yazdi, to “go and kick them out.” But—in another of Anderson’s consequential contingencies—Yazdi, rather than communicating that command to Tehran, travelled there himself. By the time he arrived, Khomeini had changed his mind and publicly embraced the hostage-takers. Unable to control the situation, Bazargan resigned. Crowds took up a new chant: “Death to Bazargan.”
And death to liberal Iran. A new constitution placed the country under the supreme leadership of an Islamic legal scholar, and Article 107 stipulated that this be Khomeini. Women were purged from positions of power and forced to wear hijabs. Universities were closed, for years. Khomeini, meeting with state-radio employees, insisted that there was “no difference between music and opium” and demanded that they “eliminate music completely”—his opposition drove most music underground.
Firmly in control, Khomeini turned on his former allies, particularly those on the left. They weren’t a “real left,” he maintained, but an “artificial” one created by Washington “to sabotage and destroy us.” In one execution spree, in 1988, Khomeini’s government put to death thousands of political prisoners—Human Rights Watch reports “between 2,800 and 5,000,” which appears to far exceed the number of political prisoners that were killed in the nearly forty years that the Shah was on the throne. The prisons and torture chambers filled with Communists, liberals, feminists, gays, Baha’is, and monarchists.
One might imagine such cruelties destabilizing the Islamic Republic. They have not done so. Since 1979, Iran has been ruled continuously by just two men: Ruhollah Khomeini and, after his death, in 1989, his former disciple Ali Khamenei. Today, Khamenei ranks among the world’s oldest and longest-serving heads of state. He’s been Supreme Leader for every one of Taylor Swift’s eras, indeed for her entire life.
There was talk that the recent attacks by Israel and the United States might end Khamenei’s thirty-six-year reign. “All it takes now is a nationwide uprising to put an end to this nightmare,” the Shah’s son, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, thirstily suggested. He should know. But Tehran has faced war before without toppling. An eight-year conflict with Iraq in the eighties killed hundreds of thousands yet only strengthened Khomeini’s position. As Israel has seen in Gaza, it’s hard to persuade people to change their government by bombing them.
The larger instability today seems to be in the United States, not Iran. Norms here are shifting wildly, with the chaos centering on a single figure, our Napoleon on a golf cart. The usual questions arise: Is Donald Trump an accident or an inevitability? An erratic blunderer or the spray-tanned spirit of history? It may not ultimately matter. As Anderson’s book suggests, an event that is improbable can still be irreversible. A switch is thrown, the train hurtles down an alternate track, and it goes that way for a very long time. ♦
