In King of Kings, Scott Anderson revisits the fall of Iran’s last Shah and the 1979 Iranian Revolution. With Iran once again roiled by protests and the United States leaning into dangerous rhetoric, Anderson spoke to The Hindu at the Jaipur Literature Festival about his fascination with the country, the revolution’s relevance today, and why predicting what comes next remains so difficult. Edited excerpts:
You mentioned a road trip you took with your father in your teens through the West and central Asia, and about having watched the protests that happened when the Shah visited Washington in 1977. Is that where your intense interest in Iran began?
My father took me out of school for the trip in 1974-75. We were living in England then. I didn’t go to ninth grade; we travelled for a year in a Volkswagen camper. It changed my life. We went to India, East Asia, Afghanistan and Iran. What I remember from the trip to Iran is that every village had a statue or a poster of the Shah, like a kind of personality cult.
Right after high school, I was working for the American Treasury Department, and I happened to be outside the White House when the Shah was on a state visit to meet President Jimmy Carter in November, 1977.
There was a massive brawl between pro and anti-Shah supporters. Some of the teargas the police used wafted towards the dignitaries, and they had tears streaming down their faces. This proved to be something of a trigger for the Iranian Revolution.
The Iranian National Television, government-controlled, streamed it live, and what people back in Iran saw were thousands of anti-Shah demonstrators, pitched battles between pro and anti-Shah protesters. Within weeks, the first large anti-Shah demonstrations began in Tehran.
Why did no one — the U.S. or the Shah — see the Iranian revolution coming?
A couple of reasons. There were so many times when the Shah could have been resolute, and he did nothing to stop it. If he had been tough, he probably would have survived.
It was also systemic in both the American and Iranian governments — there were clearly problems (sycophancy and the doctoring of numbers to hide the truth), but nobody in either administration looked into them and simply looked away. Also, we had never seen a religious counter-revolution, and everyone underestimated Khomeini.
Along with this religious outpouring, it was also an anti-colonial movement.
The Shah was seen as an American lackey, and anything he did, even with reforms, he didn’t get any credit for it from his own people. The Shah couldn’t figure out a way out of it; he embraced the Americans and it ultimately backfired on him.
Cutting to the present, has Donald Trump, with his threats, especially post-Venezuela, taken things to a more dangerous place?
I think the danger with Trump is that he doesn’t think before he talks. He thinks he is smart, but he is not. The people around him are engineering some of the stuff.
Recently, he said he was going to act against the regime in Iran. People around him said, ‘Are you going to bomb Iran? you are surely not going to put American troops on the ground’, and so Trump walked it back. Meanwhile, he encouraged the Iranian people to rise up, and thus contributed to thousands getting killed. If Trump gets caught out, he just changes the subject. Now it’s Greenland.
You never know what he is going to do next, and in its own way, it is powerful, and people back down for a reason. Why are the Danes and Greenlanders even talking to Trump about some arrangement? Is something like that happening in Iran as well?
Well, maybe some deal has been/or will be struck between the regime and the Americans. What I am hearing from inside Iran is that the protests have been quashed. Thousands are feared dead. Yet, this time things are different. The regime is in a difficult spot because every Iranian has been affected by the sanctions, devaluation and the economic collapse. In the past, the regime has played one group off another, but that’s not going to work now because everybody is suffering.
You can’t blame the economic collapse, the food crisis, the water crisis, and high unemployment on foreign saboteurs.
What about Iran’s nuclear programme?
We might see a deal cut that they suspend their nuclear programme, to clear a way for easing of sanctions, but that is going to take a while. There could be another bout of violence.
The Revolutionary Guard is the economic power in Iran; they own hotels, casinos, cement plants and excessive amounts of money. What I can potentially see is the religious old guard being sidelined, and a power shift to a military regime — the Revolutionary Guard is likely to be the real power — in a quiet partnership with the Americans.
What does it mean for West Asia?
If I were an Iranian leader, I’d think my days of being a regional power are over — Hezbollah is crushed, the Houthis in Yemen are weakened, Syria, my biggest state ally, is gone. It’s perhaps best then to mend fences with the Saudis, the UAE, and I think that they would welcome that and go out of their way to make that happen. It may actually play out to the benefit of everybody if Iran is able to rejoin the group of nations rather than be sanctioned; it could change things positively. But it is so difficult to try to predict how things will play out.
You write in your book about the politics of the veil. In the Shah’s time, grandmothers had discarded it, but during the revolution, women willingly got back to it. Is a similar cycle playing out?
In cities, a lot of women don’t wear headscarves anymore. That was something they gained from the Women, Life Freedom Movement.
During the recent protests, people screamed ‘long live Shah’, calling for the Shah’s son to come back. I have two explanations for that — one is that he is the only identifiable opposition figure, there is no opposition domestically, and nobody in exile as prominent as the crown prince.
For years, the theocracy in Iran has called the Shah regime evil and corrupt, and for people now coming out and saying, ‘long, live Shah’, it’s clearly done in rage, and to antagonise the regime.
