The Iranian Revolution Almost Didn’t Happen

August 4, 2025 / Billboard Lifestyle /

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.

Cartoon by Brian Frazer and Sam Frazer

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.