Nixon in Iran
Did the Islamic Republic listen to Tricky Dick?
15 March 2026
Richard Nixon liked the Shah of Iran. He first met Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1953, when he was only thirty-four years old. In his 1992 book Leaders, Nixon wrote that he was impressed by the Shah’s “quiet dignity” and his “eagerness to learn”. At that point in time, the Shah formally occupied the throne under Iran’s constitutional monarchy, but real political power lay largely with the nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and his parliamentary coalition. Nixon recalled thinking that the Shah “would be a gifted leader once he began to guide his country personally.”
Out of the Middle Ages
As it happened, Nixon didn’t have long to wait. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi began to exercise real effective authority over Iran later that very same year, when the overthrow of Mosaddegh enabled him to consolidate power over the military and political system. Over the course of the next two decades, the Shah would, in Nixon’s words, use his power “to wrench his country out of the Middle Ages and into the modern world by teaching the illiterate to read, emancipating women, working an agricultural revolution, and building new industry.”
What Nixon largely omits is the degree to which the Shah’s regime relied heavily on the secret police (SAVAK), tightly controlled elections, and the imprisonment and torture of political opponents. By 1975 the Shah had effectively created a one-party state. Many of the groups that later joined the revolutionary coalition — liberals, students, clerics, and Marxists — had been systematically excluded from legal political participation. In other words, the Shah’s modernisation was accompanied by political closure.
Such things did not trouble Nixon, of course. A year after the Shah had been forced into exile by the Islamic Revolution, Nixon fondly recalled visiting his friend in Mexico:
The Shah had the same regal dignity [as in 1953], but his youthful eagerness was gone. In its place was an almost desperate frustration. His power had been wrenched from his hands by the leaders of a movement that was sworn to reverse all that he had done and plunge Iran back into medieval darkness. The Ayatollah’s crimes against his people seemed to pain the Shah personally. He was a man who had been misjudged, misunderstood, and misused, and his knowledge of this was eating away at him as devastatingly as his physical illness.
A well-timed crackdown
Reflecting on this unexpected fall from grace, Nixon claimed that the Shah had not lost power because he was too ruthless. On the contrary, Nixon argued that the Shah’s fatal mistake lay in not being ruthless enough. The monarch had hesitated. He had oscillated between repression and concession. He had wavered at precisely the moment when decisive force might have preserved his rule. In Nixon’s words, a “well-timed crackdown” would have saved Iran from the revolutionary darkness that followed.
Contrary to popular myth, the Shah’s fall came not because he was a heartless tyrant; quite the contrary. One reason was impatience; he may have tried to do too much, too quickly. But a second, also important reason was that he was not ruthless enough in quashing those who threatened his nation’s stability. A well-timed crackdown on his enemies, rather than the ill-advised concessions he made to them as the crisis unfolded, would have been the best thing the Shah could have done to save Iran from the darkness that has now engulfed it.
It was a very Nixonian judgement. Order, in Nixon’s worldview, was the first duty of a state. Revolutions did not represent the flowering of liberty but the breakdown of authority. If a government failed to defend itself early and decisively, it invited catastrophe. The Shah, in this reading, allowed his enemies to gather strength by signalling weakness.
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Whether one agrees with Nixon or not, his argument identifies a phenomenon political scientists often describe as the danger of oscillation. Authoritarian regimes sometimes fall not because they repress too harshly but because they cannot decide whether to repress or reform. When rulers alternate between concessions and crackdowns, they send contradictory signals to the public, the opposition, and — most dangerously — to the security forces whose loyalty determines the fate of the regime. Soldiers who suspect that their leaders may abandon them hesitate to enforce repression. Once that hesitation spreads, revolutions become possible.
The Shah’s behaviour in 1978 illustrates this dynamic rather clearly. As protests spread across Iran, he alternated between harsh measures and promises of liberalisation. One month the government imposed martial law; the next it spoke of political reform. Prisoners were released; then demonstrations were violently dispersed. The regime lurched between coercion and conciliation. In the process it convinced almost everyone that it no longer knew what it was doing.
The result was the Iranian Revolution, which swept the monarchy away and brought to power the clerical movement led by Ruhollah Khomeini. To Nixon, the lesson seemed obvious. The Shah should have acted earlier and more decisively. A swift and ruthless crackdown, he believed, would have preserved the state.
Learning from Nixon
History has a sense of humour, however. The regime that replaced the Shah eventually adopted precisely the governing logic Nixon recommended. The Islamic Republic learned early that survival depended on the loyalty and decisiveness of its security apparatus. Over the decades it built a system designed to prevent the very hesitation that doomed the monarchy. The Revolutionary Guards, the Basij militia, and a network of intelligence agencies ensured that the state retained the capacity to respond quickly and forcefully to internal unrest. Whatever else one might say about the Islamic Republic, it rarely suffers from doubts about whether it should repress dissent.
The contrast became particularly visible during the protests that erupted on 28 December 2025. Demonstrations spread rapidly across Iran amid economic crisis, inflation, and deep social frustration. What began with bazaar merchants in Tehran and university students soon expanded into a nationwide mobilisation. Within days crowds were gathering across all thirty-one provinces. Protesters attacked symbols of the state and openly called for the end of the Islamic Republic.
In revolutionary situations momentum is everything. Movements grow when they appear unstoppable and collapse when they encounter overwhelming force. The authorities understood this perfectly. Instead of oscillating between reform and repression, the state moved quickly and decisively. Internet and telephone services were cut to disrupt coordination. Officials framed the unrest as the work of hostile foreign powers, a narrative that strengthened the resolve of security forces and justified harsh measures against demonstrators.
Most importantly, the regime did not hesitate to use lethal force. Reports from hospitals in Tehran, Shiraz, and other cities described waves of gunshot casualties as security forces fired live ammunition into crowds. Eyewitness accounts spoke of widespread shootings in urban centres during the peak of the crackdown in early January. The scale of the violence, documented by international media and human rights organisations, suggested that tens of thousands may have been killed in a matter of days.
Mass arrests followed. Communications blackouts disrupted coordination among protesters. By mid-January the demonstrations had largely been suppressed. A movement that had mobilised millions across the country was contained with extraordinary speed.
What would Nixon say?
One can debate endlessly the moral legitimacy of such repression. The humanitarian cost was immense, and the crackdown was widely condemned abroad. Yet from the narrow perspective of regime survival, the strategy worked. The Islamic Republic did not repeat the Shah’s mistake of oscillation. It chose repression immediately and decisively.
This raises an uncomfortable question. If Nixon were observing events from the sidelines, would he not recognise in this response something remarkably close to his own prescription? The Shah, he once wrote, fell because he hesitated to crush his enemies at the decisive moment. The regime that replaced him seems determined never to make that mistake.
The irony is difficult to miss. Nixon believed a timely crackdown might have saved the monarchy from the Islamic Revolution. Instead, the Islamic Republic perfected the very logic he advocated. Ayatollah Khamenei appears to have absorbed the central lesson Nixon thought the Shah had failed to learn. When confronted with mass protest, he did not hesitate.
One cannot help wondering whether Richard Nixon would approve.
