Inside Reza Pahlavi’s faltering bid to lead Iran

As US and Israeli forces struck deep into Iran in early 2026,  a familiar figure from the country’s pre-revolutionary past stepped forward with bold claims. Reza Pahlavi, the 65-year-old son of Iran’s last shah, declared that the Islamic Republic was on the brink of collapse and that the Iranian people had called on him to lead the transition to democracy.

“I’m not the destination, I’m a bridge to the destination,” he told Reuters in interviews this month. Yet what once looked like a transformative moment for the long-exiled prince has instead exposed deep fractures in the Iranian opposition, quiet rejection by the Trump administration, and growing doubts among his own financial backers. Pahlavi has not set foot in Iran for nearly half a century.

He left as a 17-year-old aviation enthusiast in 1978 to train as a jet pilot at Reese Air Force Base in Texas. The 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled his father, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, kept him in permanent exile. He later earned a degree in social sciences and communication from the University of Southern California and has spent decades casting himself as the face of the opposition. Personal tragedy has shadowed him: his father died of cancer in 1980, his sister Leila of a drug overdose in 2001, and his brother Alireza by suicide in 2011.

He has never held a conventional salaried job, describing his lifelong activism as unpaid “pro bono” work for his country.

When the latest war erupted in late February, Pahlavi moved quickly.

On X he announced that the Iranian people had asked him to lead the post-regime transition and that he had accepted. In March he received a hero’s welcome at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas, where Iranian-American supporters waving the pre-1979 lion-and-sun flag gave him a 45-second standing ovation. Four days later, however, President Donald Trump posted that the United States was “blasting Iran into oblivion or, as they say, back to the Stone Ages!!!” Pahlavi’s muted response stunned some of the Iranian-American business leaders who had recently funneled more than $3 million into his campaign through a private WhatsApp group of roughly 28 donors whose companies together represent more than $1 trillion in market value.

That CPAC moment now looks like the high-water mark. Behind the scenes the Trump administration had already begun distancing itself. In January Trump told Reuters that Pahlavi “seems very nice, but I don’t know how he’d play within his own country.” When Iranian-American activist Ahmad Batebi prepared to speak at a United Nations Security Council meeting about Tehran’s bloody crackdown on protests, U.S. Ambassador Mike Waltz personally urged him not to mention Pahlavi by name.

Waltz later told Reuters he wanted a tight focus on the regime’s barbarism rather than opposition politics.

In June, after a fragile ceasefire memorandum of understanding, Vice President JD Vance stated flatly on a podcast: “The President of the United States never said that his goal was to install Reza Pahlavi to become the new leader of Iran.” The agreement itself made no reference to regime change and affirmed respect for Iran’s sovereignty. Pahlavi and his aides denounced the deal on social media as a compromise with a “criminal regime.”Donors who once saw Pahlavi as the most viable unifier have grown disillusioned. In private calls, according to people familiar with the conversations, they urged him to work harder to unite the fractured opposition—monarchists, republicans, leftists, ethnic activists—and to more forcefully condemn violence and harassment by some of his radical supporters against other Iranian dissidents.

He listened but largely did not follow their advice, sources said. There is no evidence Pahlavi directed or approved the incidents. Yet they have damaged his image.

In London in March, a Kurdish reporter covering a protest was beaten after Pahlavi supporters demanded the pre-revolution flag be displayed. In the Netherlands an activist linked to the movement faces investigation for doxxing a critic. In Vienna, supporters threatened a restaurant owner who refused to fly the old flag; one was later convicted. In Canada, two men associated with the monarchist cause were charged with the murder of a longtime critic of Pahlavi who had sued him in court; the case remains unresolved and no evidence ties Pahlavi to the killing.

One of Pahlavi’s aides posted on X that opponents of the prince were effectively “agents of the enemy.” Critics inside the broader opposition, including former political prisoner Hossein Ronaghi, argue Pahlavi bears moral responsibility to police his own ranks more aggressively.

Pahlavi has since condemned the violence unequivocally and tightened protocols for his aides, telling them they can no longer act independently.Unity efforts have repeatedly stalled. In 2023, according to three people familiar with the episode, Pahlavi’s wife Yasmine allegedly dismissed other opposition figures as “nobodies”—a claim she denies. Two activists who pushed for the U.S. to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization said Pahlavi promised support but then largely stayed on the sidelines. “All talk and no action,” one told Reuters.

Pahlavi rejects the portrayal of a sputtering campaign. In lengthy interviews with Reuters in Paris this month he insisted the regime is “very close” to collapse and that January’s protests—triggered by economic despair and repression—showed the Iranian people still form the “boots on the ground.” Official Iranian figures put the death toll at least 5,000; Pahlavi claims 40,000.

The massacre, he said, forced a change in his thinking: foreign military pressure is needed “to equal the playing field.” He claims to communicate with “cell leaders” of more than a thousand groupings inside Iran spanning labor, academia, religion and ethnic communities, though Reuters could not independently verify the scale of that network. A late-June online survey by the Netherlands-based Gamaan Research Institute of more than 31,000 respondents found that roughly 48 percent of Iranians view him favorably—an impressive number under authoritarian conditions, yet far from a mandate.Supporters remain passionate. Some Iranian Americans at New York protests this spring wore lockets pairing Trump and Pahlavi under the slogan “MIGA—Make Iran Great Again,” invoking memories of relative prosperity and modernization under the shah.

High-profile donors, including Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, have contributed funds primarily for security rather than any restoration of monarchy. U.S. Representative Derrick Van Orden, who met Pahlavi in Washington, described him as articulate and humble, someone who “just looks presidential.”Critics are harsher.

Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group, who met Pahlavi years ago, concluded the prince lacked the appetite for the political fight required. “He’s much more passionate about football, food and photography than politics,” Vaez said.

Author Scott Anderson has called him a “lightweight” living inside a “royalist bubble.” Pahlavi acknowledges the weight of his family name—“that’s a positive,” he said, because people chant it in the streets—but insists his mission has never been about restoring the monarchy. He has reached out even to former enemies of his father, he said, and welcomes all ideologies in a future democratic Iran.

“It is not for a foreign government to decide who or what should be the alternative for Iran. That’s up to the Iranian people.”The deeper problem, as the Reuters investigation underscores, is structural.

Iran’s security apparatus has systematically eliminated or driven into exile potential alternative leaders. No single figure, including Pahlavi, commands an organized mass movement ready to seize power the way the Islamists did in 1979 or as Nelson Mandela and Lech Walesa did in their countries.

The Islamic Republic, battered but intact after the killing of its supreme leader, has tightened its grip. As the United States continues to negotiate with Tehran without demanding regime change, Pahlavi’s vision of himself as the indispensable bridge faces an uncertain road.

Whether the Iranian people ultimately choose to cross it remains the unanswered question at the heart of one of the region’s most consequential and unresolved political dramas.

This is a summary of a Reuters Investigation by Steve Stecklow, Nathan Layne and Gavin Finch