Scott Anderson is a veteran war correspondent and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. His latest book is King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution—A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Scott Anderson discuss whether the current protests could finally topple Iran’s theocratic regime, what role the Revolutionary Guard might play in determining the country’s future, and whether a democratic Iran could emerge from the ashes of the Islamic Republic.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Mounk: So we recorded a wonderful, deep, historical dive into Iran in, I believe, July of last year. And I was really looking forward to releasing that episode and thought perhaps we can wait for some topical hook that’ll make that episode more relevant. And boy, did we get a topical hook over the last days.
There are these wonderful, inspiring pictures that also make me a little bit scared about what may be around the corner from Iran with just huge numbers of people taking to the streets to call for the end of the regime of the mullahs in a more open and more concerted way than probably at any point since 1979. What’s your read on the situation in Tehran and so many other cities around Iran today? Should we get our hopes up for an end to this regime?
Anderson: I think more than probably ever in the last 45 years, the regime is in serious, serious trouble. There have been moments in the past when it was in somewhat trouble.
What’s different this time with these protests? The regime in the past has always been very adept at playing one segment of society off against another. The religious against the more secular, the rural against the urban. The Women’s Freedom protests of three years ago, they were able to talk about it being—she was a Kurdish woman, the woman who was killed by the morality police—to kind of play the ethnic card.
This time, that’s not going to work because this is an economic collapse that has happened with the devaluation of Iran. So everybody is affected. Playing off one side against the other is just not going to work this time. The second thing that’s quite different is you now have an Iranian president, Pezeshkian, who’s come out in sort of solidarity, or at least in sympathy with the protesters.
He doesn’t have an awful lot of genuine power—Supreme Leader Khamenei does—but what he has is a voice, and that voice cannot really be shut up. So you have a very different dynamic taking place now than you’ve ever had before.
Mounk: What would it actually take for these protests to topple the regime? A lot of the time political scientists assume that as long as the regime stays united, it can be deeply unpopular, it can constitute a small portion of a population, it is able to see off challenges to it., But what I’m also afraid of is that you could imagine the Revolutionary Guard starting to fire in even more massive ways than they already have in the last days on protesters and using simple brute force to crack down on this movement.
The question is whether cracks start appearing within the regime. The president semi-claiming to be on the side of protest might be one sign of that. Defecting elite members would obviously be a key sign of that. What do you think it would take and are we seeing the signs of that happening?
Anderson: Well, I think the great unknown quantity here is what the Revolutionary Guard, the defenders of the regime, and the military, actually doesRather like Egypt or mainland China, the Revolutionary Guard is a force unto itself. It’s an economic force. It’s a corporation. So what you have is a military that is not just supporting the regime for philosophical or theological reasons, but for economic reasons.
Their bread and butter is at stake here. So I really think that what you could see is an end of the theocracy, but I fear what could replace it is a military dictatorship. And I think it could get very, very bloody because I don’t think the Revolutionary Guard are going to accede to stepping aside peacefully. This could get very, very ugly.
Mounk: So the Revolutionary Guard have this weird double nature, and you know this better than I do so correct me if I’m misdescribing it. They were among the vanguard of the revolution. They were the people supposed to protect the revolution, to ensure that it succeeds and that it can’t be overthrown. They were supposed therefore to have, in the Iranian context, this deeply religious mission.
But as you’re pointing out, they are now effectively running large parts of the Iranian economy. And one of the main reasons why somebody may have aspired around 2005 or 2010 to become a senior member of the Revolutionary Guards is that that comes with a huge amount of material and other privileges in society. And so even as this is supposed to be a deeply theocratic institution, it is also run by a lot of people who may simply be social climbers, materially ambitious people.
Is it imaginable that the Revolutionary Guard kind of rebrands itself as a military caste more similar to a place like Egypt where the military tends to have a more secular bent? It’s a little bit hard to imagine, but you’re right that perhaps the incentive-based perspective would say they’re simply going to guard the material interests. What they really don’t want to give up is a cushy lifestyle, and perhaps they’re willing to overthrow some of the religious pieties. It’s a little hard to imagine, but is that what you think?
Anderson: Yeah Egypt is actually a good case study of that. When the dissent against [Hosni] Mubarak reached a certain point, essentially the military stepped in and forced him to leave. And then they went through elections, but they stood in the wings waiting for the Muslim Brotherhood to kind of fall on its face. And then they stepped back in again.
I think all through that brief period between Mubarak being overthrown and General Sisi coming back in, the military was just waiting its time. And I think you could see something very similar now in Iran. If the price for the Revolutionary Guard is getting rid of [Ali] Khamenei and the ayatollahs around him and putting in some sort of a military regime or a Muslim-lite regime, the Revolutionary Guard would do that.
Again, I think that money corrupts and I think when you have this incredible economic power that the Revolutionary Guard has, which has been harnessed over these past four and a half decades, I just don’t see them stepping aside on that lightly. So there may be a shell game played like there was kind of in Egypt. But barring that, I think it’s going to get very, very bloody very quickly.
Mounk: So listeners will enjoy our deep conversation we had a few months ago that really gives you a sense of how the Shah fell and how this religious regime rose. One of the key moments was when it became obvious that people were so afraid of a revolution that the top people started to flee.
And we are not quite at that point yet on Friday morning or early afternoon Eastern Time as we’re recording this, but there are rumors of this being about to happen. There are rumors that the spiritual leadership may be seeking refuge in Russia, or at least making arrangements to be able to seek refuge in Russia if the time comes for that. Are there any echoes between 1979 and the situation in Tehran today?
Anderson: It’s not unimaginable. Now I have to realize I have to contradict almost everything I said back in July. The situation in Iran has changed so dramatically in the past two weeks. I’ve been talking with people in the opposition in Iran all summer and into the fall and winter. And as I think I mentioned back when we talked last, there was a real feeling of despondency among the opposition.
The American and Israeli bombings of Iran in July produced this tremendous rallying around the flag effect. And what opposition people were telling me then was, if we go to the streets now and demonstrate against the regime, we’re going to be painted as lackeys of the Americans and the Israelis. So they really felt that the opposition movement had been kind of set back. And they were estimating a couple of years.
What’s different this time is the economic collapse has spread all the way across—all sectors of society have been affected by this. So the thing of playing off one against the other is not working. I was talking to people who are in Iran as recently as three, maybe four days ago now. Can’t talk to them now, all communication’s been cut off. But they were getting more and more hopeful. And I think that now with the events of the past 48 hours, I haven’t spoken with anyone in the past 48 hours, I can imagine it’s.
Mounk: Is this something on which you’ve changed your mind? In our conversation in July, I think we briefly talked about Reza Pahlavi and you said that it seemed very unlikely for him to come back. This is something that, knowing much less about Iran, I shared. It just seems like, having been the legitimate pretender to the throne since 1979 and spent his entire life in exile in the suburbs of D.C.—I believe in Maryland—the idea that you would go back and take office in Iran just seems absurd.
But it is striking that that is the chant that you’re hearing in the streets of Iran. And that, of course, because there’s so little of an organized opposition movement because of the depth of repression within the country and because the exiled community of Iranians is very split, he is, in a sense, the most natural focal point. And so just to play devil’s advocate here, I think he’d be unlikely to return as a dictator or as a ruler. But constitutional monarchies have a pretty good track record in the modern world.
And there are lots of modern countries like the United Kingdom and the Netherlands and Denmark and Sweden that have constitutional monarchs. And I think that ambitious a man as Reza Pahlavi may be, if you told him the deal is you come back and you oversee the democratic transition, you get to be a national hero a little bit like Juan Carlos of Spain until his latter years and various scandals diminished his reputation. That seems pretty appealing for a man in his, I believe, mid or perhaps late 60s. Is it still unimaginable?
Anderson: Going to Crown Prince Reza, and again talking about the parallels to ’79, I think of Khomeini. Khomeini was in exile as Reza is now. He was seen as an unlikely leader of the country, but he was seen as the person who could kind of serve as spiritual guide—the figurehead that everyone could rally around. Of course, Khomeini had other plans once he got back to Tehran.
But it’s fascinating to me that the crowds that 45 years ago were chanting “long live Khomeini” are now calling for the Shah to come back, for the Shah’s son to come back. Again, with this idea that somehow he would be the figurehead while a democracy took hold.
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I don’t think that Crown Prince Reza could pull off a Khomeini. He’s not going to take absolute power. It would not work. He may come back as a figurehead if this all plays out in that scenario, but I don’t see him wielding real power.
Mounk: Let’s dream for a moment. Let’s imagine that the regime is toppled. Let’s imagine that they manage to work out some kind of deal with the military that gives the military a nice status in society without keeping its complete stranglehold over the economy, and civil-military relations are managed to such an extent that you actually have a space for a genuine democracy.
What would that democracy look like? How much of a democratic history does Iran have? To what extent has the country secularized? Obviously, I think there is a segment of the Iranian population that is deeply resentful about the religious dictates from the top. There’s a very low fertility rate in Iran. I believe women are more likely to have university degrees than men, young women at least. It is in many ways a society that is secularized, I imagine, but there are also deep pockets of genuine—not just religious feeling, which is of course compatible with democracy—but allegiance to the theocracy and hostility to secular democracy that also exist in Iran.
And then of course, there are the fault lines that exist in many countries in the world, but that make it hard for democracy to take hold: regional differences, ethnic divisions, and other kinds of things. If Iran were to have free and fair elections in 2027, do you think there’s a realistic hope that democracy in a country that is relatively affluent by comparison to other countries struggling to be democratic, that has this bottled up longing for a more secular democratic set of institutions, would stick? Or do you think that Iran would likely end up like the countries of the Arab Spring, the last of which has just seen its democracy die in Tunisia over the course of the last years?
Anderson: I would say that Iran probably has a better chance of actually emerging into a democracy than most countries in the Middle East. It has at least a parliamentary tradition, even though that parliament has largely been a rubber stamp for—well, certainly for the past century.
You have two elements of society in Iran that would—this is going to sound elitist—but that do give hope for a kind of democratic outcome. One, you have this enormous Iranian diaspora: millions of Iranians of the wealthy and upper middle class who left Iran in the wake of the Shah’s departure. And you also have a similar class of society within Iran today. You do have a very educated, very wealthy, affluent class
You do have this kind of educated elite that could steer the country towards a democratic outcome, one that you wouldn’t have in, say, Syria or Iraq. So I think there is a chance that it could be a democratic outcome. But I go back to what I think the huge question mark right now is—what the Revolutionary Guard does.
If we just play out the scenario, let’s say the Ayatollahs go into exile and the military steps in and says, we’re going to maintain order, we’re going to stay in power until we can maintain order. And that becomes a dictatorship. Then what happens to the opposition that are in the streets right now? They’re not going against a fossilized theocratic regime, but against a professional army. And I think that could get very, very nasty.
Mounk: I have the same fears, unfortunately. Let’s talk a little bit about what the situation of women in Iran would be under those different scenarios. Obviously, there’s a scenario in which the Ayatollahs don’t lose power, and it probably is still the most likely scenario.
And they might decide that in order to regain power, they have to repurify the country and reimpose the hold of the norms they believe to be holy with even greater vengeance than over the last years. You could imagine that the tiny spaces for self-expression that exist in that society today might be eliminated. You could also imagine them saying, all right, perhaps we need to make certain kinds of concessions, and we loosen the obligation to wear a headscarf in certain ways or something like that.
The second scenario I guess we should think through is the Revolutionary Guard scenario. The Ayatollahs flee, the Revolutionary Guards keep power. I guess in that scenario, you wouldn’t have democracy, you may still have a very corrupt economy, but the thing that it might be easiest for them to give on is some of those personal liberties. That might be the easiest thing to sacrifice from their point of view, but perhaps I’m not thinking through that in the right way. And the third question, of course, is what do you think happened to women and how do you think Iranian women will be able to realize their aspirations if we did have a genuine transition to democracy?
Anderson: It’s hard to imagine that Iran is much more liberal now, certainly when it comes to social interchange, than it was even five years ago. The regime so far has been, I mean, I say adept in knowing when to relieve the pressure a little bit. For example, just with the hijab, women do not have to wear head scarves now, at least in most major Iranian cities. They’re not harassed like they were even just three years ago.
That is all very difficult to roll back, I think, at this point. And as you said, you have this enormous educated class of Iranian women. I just don’t see the system as it is even now continuing to hold.
What you’ve always had in Iran, certainly in the last 10, 15 years—people of the educated class, people of the upper class, they’re not the people taking bullets from the Basijis in the streets. They’re not being clubbed, they’re not being beaten to death by the morality police. Those people have always had a certain immunity from the theocratic regime. And I think that is what is collapsing now. You could say in a way that segment of society was sort of bought off by the regime. And I think with this economic collapse that you’re seeing now, that’s just not working.
A few days ago the regime announced that they were going to give everybody $7 of a payment to help with the 40 percent inflation. Well, $7 is not going to solve the regime’s problems.
Mounk: Yeah.
Anderson: It tends to be students, tends to be intellectuals, tends to be residents of the biggest cities. And those kinds of movements are then relatively easy to beat back. It is when those brave activists who keep the flame of opposition alive for year after year after year suddenly fuse with a much broader economically based discontent where people are angry. Perhaps they also disliked all of that stuff, right? They also suffered from all of that stuff. They also disagreed with the regime on a million other things.
But it’s the moment when they feel like, I don’t know what to make for dinner for my kids. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to pay the electricity bill. I’m not sure that I’m going to be able to heat my apartment in the winter. They say, this is now worth going on the streets for. And that’s sort of what feels like the difference between the protests we’ve seen again and again in Iranian history. Because the very brave Iranian opposition has tried to stand up to this regime a few years ago with the Women Life Freedom Movement around, I believe, 2008 around a rigged election in which there were hopes for a more moderate president and the Green Movement. Again and again. But it is now that the living conditions of ordinary Iranians have become so much worse that you see a much broader mass-based movement.
Mounk: What was that for you to move?
Anderson: That’s right. Again, with echoes of 1978-79, the Iranian Revolution that overthrew the Shah was basically born on the backs of young, uneducated men from the countryside who had come into the city trying to find their piece of the Iranian economic miracle. And then when the recession hit, they’re stuck in these awful shanty towns on the outskirts of Tehran and other Iranian cities. And I strongly suspect it’s going to be that same kind of demographic group that is going to, if this does become a revolution and very bloody, that is going to be the class of people that are going to take most of the bullets.
It’s not going to be university students, it’s not going to be college professors or intellectuals. It’s going to be those people who now have absolutely no future.
Mounk: So let’s take a step back here. After the attacks on the Iranian nuclear program in June carried out by Israel and by the United States, it felt as though they may have set back the aspirations of the Iranian opposition. As you were saying, when you were talking to people in the summer, they felt like if we go out to protest now, it looks like we’re on the side of the least popular nations in Iran, and that’s not going to put us in good stead.
From the perspective of today, it does seem as though some of the attacks and some of the sanctions imposed by America over the last year are at least an indirect cause of these protests. I certainly am no admirer of the current occupant of the White House and while I am very happy that this dictator is behind bars because like the Iranian regime with which he was very close, he was a terrible dictator, I fear that the outlook for actual improvements in Venezuela seem to be slim. But do us critics of Trump and the White House have to say—their policy of humiliating Iran, of showing the weakness of the leadership, of making it very hard for Iran to thrive economically, of leaving the deal that the Biden administration and before the Obama administration had cut with Iran. Is all of that working? Is all of that part of the reason for what’s going on in the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities today?
Anderson: In a strange way, I feel—and again, I’m reminded of Jimmy Carter. I never thought I’d put Trump and Carter in the same sentence. Jimmy Carter came in with his whole emphasis on human rights, and I think that had a knock-on effect throughout the world, including in Iran. It gave support to people who were against dictatorships and care about human rights. I think it emboldened the Iranian opposition against the shah.
Similarly, Trump’s kind of scattershot approach to the world, the kind of madman theory of “you never know what he’s going to do next”—and that carries a certain power—I think has probably emboldened the opposition inside Iran.
That said, nobody likes to have their country bombed by a foreign power. And that’s why I was speaking up this summer from the opposition people saying the bombing was the worst thing that could happen to us. It’s very difficult to say what is really driving this. How much of it is being encouraged by the Americans? Are people seeing what happened to Maduro in Venezuela and seeing hope in that?
I tend to feel it’s more just this utter economic collapse. People just—in one week they saw their life savings turn to dust. And I think on top of everything else, all the other problems they’ve had with the regime, the food shortages, the embargo, they’ve just reached a breaking point.
Mounk: Tell us a little bit about what the impact of a change of regime in Iran would be on the region.
The Iranian regime has obviously been malign in its ruthless control of Iranian society and its cruel treatment of any opposition leaders within the country. There’s also been a very malign influence in the Middle East more broadly with its support of Hamas and other organizations. How would the Middle East transform in a post-Ayatollah Iran?
Anderson: My hunch would be any region comes in whether it’s revolutionary garner or democratic regime or some other dictator—I think that they would immediately cut their proxy forces. Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen—they’ve all been kind of decimated in the last two years, primarily by the Israelis. So their role as a regional power is already kind of finished.
If I were to become Iranian president tomorrow, the first thing I would do would be to repair fences with the other Middle Eastern countries around me that are run by you—to get over the whole Sunni-Shia split that has been so exacerbated by the Iranian regime the past 45 years. I think if they do that, they would be met with quite a bit of goodwill in the region. They have been a pariah state and increasingly so as they’ve stepped up their support of these proxy regimes in the past 15 years. But I think other regimes in the region, certainly the Saudis, would very much appreciate seeing Iran cut off their ties to these different guerrilla groups around the region.
Mounk: Again, I’m very hopeful about the situation in Iran and am conscious that there’s a very high likelihood that we’re getting ahead of ourselves. My hunch continues to be that negative outcomes are more likely than positive outcomes.
Anderson: Well, I think that if the Trump administration were smart, they would just stay out of things for a while. The first thing I would be looking for inside Iran would be a fracturing of the Iranian military. Is there going to become a reluctance of the military to just wantonly machine gun people in the streets?
Again, it reminds me a bit of Egypt in the Arab Spring. People who know the Egyptian military—not the commanders at the top who were the head of the corporation, but the guys they put out on the streets—the Egyptian military has a limited appetite for murdering its own people.
I don’t think you could say the same about the Syrian government or the Iraqi military. So it’s going to be interesting how that will play in Iran. If this really keeps on, if the demonstrations get more violent, if the vandalism or the burning of government buildings really takes off, is the Iranian military, the men in the streets, going to be willing to just machine gun their countrymen?
That’s really what did in the Shah in ’78, ’79. From the Shah on down, he did not have an appetite for wantonly massacring people. So that is the first thing I would look for—cracks within the Iranian military.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Scott discuss the causes of the Iranian Revolution, the warning signs, and what this means for Iran today. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
