WASHINGTON — At a tenuous moment for the U.S.-Iran war, President Trump rejected Tehran’s terms for a truce proposal Monday. With negotiations stalled and concessions on a ceasefire deal dragging on, exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi emphasized that regime change still could happen.
“Of course, it (a regime change) is a possibility, but more than a possibility, it is a necessity,” Pahlavi said in a security panel hosted by Politico on Tuesday.
Pahlavi characterized Iran’s government as weakened, leaving room for a successful uprising against the theocratic regime, which has been in power since Pahlavi’s late father, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
“And therefore, when we say that now that you have a wounded beast, this is not an opportunity that you should let go,” said Pahlavi, 65, who has lived with his family near Washington for most of his adult life.
U.S.-Israel attacks in February killed the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but since his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, stepped in as Iran's current leader, many experts cautioned that Iran’s political system remained entrenched and regime change seemed unlikely.
Gordon Gray, a former U.S. diplomat who teaches at George Washington University, said he did not think Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would allow an opposition to rise up.
“I don't think they're unable to unite if given the chance. The problem is that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps isn't going to give them the chance,” Gray said.
Pahlavi, who has lived in the United States since he was 19, echoed the views of several Iranian grassroots organizations. They support a regime change led by Iranians themselves through mass mobilization and the overthrow of the country’s theocratic government, paired with U.S. political support. But they oppose a U.S.-backed military operation.
Pahlavi wants to serve as the temporary leader while Iran establishes democracy.
“What I am offering as transitional leader is precisely a mechanism or process whereby it's for the people of Iran to decide what they want and who they want as their leaders,” said Pahlavi.
However, some Iranian-American organizations, such as the Organization of Iranian American Communities, do not want him as a transitional leader.
“It is not as simple as someone who has no legitimacy in the form of Pahlavi to be able to be installed into our power from outside,” Majid Sadeghpour, the political director of the Organization of Iranian American Communities, said. “That's impossible in reality, and the people of Iran will reject it anyway and will rise up against it,” the human rights activist added.
Pahlavi has aligned himself with U.S. conservatives. However, the Trump administration does not deem Pahlavi as well-positioned to lead.
The President said in March that Pahlavi could be a possible option, but not an optimal one.
“Some people like him; we haven't been thinking too much about that," Trump said in a press briefing during his meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. “Somebody from within would be more appropriate.”
Sadeghpour said the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an exiled coalition of Iranian resistance groups from across the world, would be a better option. It was founded in 1981 and is now led by Maryam Rajavi, who proposed a 10-point plan for a future secular Iranian government, focused on democratic ideals and granting power to the people.
“The goal of the Iranian Resistance that we support is to overthrow the Iranian regime,” Sadeghpour said. “For that to occur, the Iranian people will have to overthrow this regime on their own, they will need U.S. and Western political support, they need us and they need Western political condemnation of Iranian regimes, killings and atrocities.”
Is a regime change attainable?
In recent months, some people thought that the time might have been right for such a change.
The U.S. imposed significant sanctions on Iran last year after Iran failed to renew a deal that limits their nuclear program. The value of Iran’s currency, the rial, fell sharply, sparking public outrage over rising inflation. In late December, people took to the streets and demonstrated against the government.
Iran is a diverse country of 92 million people and has over 20 ethnic groups.
“The Islamic Republic has spent decades ensuring that Iran’s citizens cannot unite against it… Any movement building has been defeated through the most brutal violence,” experts said in a report by the Human Rights Foundation.
During just two days of protesting in January, as many as 30,000 people may have been killed in the streets of Iran, Iranian health officials told Time Magazine.
Gray, who was the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia during the 2011 Arab Spring, said that the overthrow of the Tunisian government was possible then, because civil society successfully came together and overthrew a leader who “wasn't as repressive or as willing to use force against against his people, as as we see in Iran today.”
Gray said that the Iranian regime is brutally repressing anyone standing against it. The regime has engaged in widespread persecution of dissidents following the protests and the outbreak of the war. At least 22 political prisoners have been executed between March and April, according to the Center of Human Rights in Iran.
“I don't think there is a power vacuum. I think the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has a pretty strong hold on power. It may not be the only power center in Iran, but I would say they're the predominant,” said Gray.
Georgia Epiphaniou is the foreign affairs and national security reporter with the Medill News Service.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.