When I saw the images of bombs falling on Tehran — smoke rising over neighborhoods I once knew — and heard the familiar talk of liberation and an opportunity for Iranians to reclaim their country, I felt a recognition that was almost immediate.
I have lived inside this story for most of my life, first as a child in Iran, then as an immigrant to the United States, and later as someone trying to explain my country to Americans who often encounter it only in moments of crisis.
I have seen before how things unfold when an American president is cast as Iran’s savior. The year was 1977. I was five years old and standing on the side of a Tehran street when President Jimmy Carter’s motorcade drove past.
The revolution had not yet erupted, but it was already rumbling beneath the surface. To the outside world, the shah’s regime projected strength and modernity: highways, oil wealth, grand celebrations of imperial history. But behind the spectacle lay prisons, censorship and the quiet terror of the secret police. Political parties had been hollowed out, dissent punished.
Even as a child, I could feel the tension in the air. I do not recall the slogans or the speeches that day. What I remember is the adults around me leaning forward, whispering that this American president was different. He would hold the shah accountable. He would protect the Iranian people.
Back then, I carried an image of America as something almost mythic. It was not just a distant superpower. It was a moral force, a place that corrected wrongs, defended the vulnerable, tipped history toward justice. In my childhood logic, America was the grown-up who suddenly appeared on the playground to put the class bully in his place.
That was the hope in the air — that the visiting American president might act not merely as a guest of the regime but as a check upon it. That he might be, in some quiet way, a liberator. Instead, Carter toasted the shah’s rule and called Iran “an island of stability.”
Something shifted that day, not only in the politics of the country but in the psyche of the Iranian people. The belief that American power might rescue us dissolved into something harder and more sober: the realization that American interests and the aspirations of the Iranian people simply did not align.
Two years later came the revolution. Then the storming of the U.S. Embassy. Then the 444 days of the hostage crisis that would brand Iran in the American imagination for decades. Nearly half a century of mutual suspicion followed — two nations using each other as mirrors, each reflecting back a distorted image against which it could define its own virtue: one cast as the “Great Satan,” the other flattened into a caricature of religious fanaticism.
And now, once again, the old fantasy of America as savior is returning.
In recent days, American and Israeli strikes have largely targeted sites associated with Iran’s military infrastructure. The official justification is elastic — deterrence, security, stabilization — terms broad enough to stretch around almost any action. The rhetoric around the campaign, however, is as clear as can be.
Hours after the first bombs fell on Tehran, President Trump addressed the Iranian people directly, urging them to “take over your government” after having promised that “help is on its way.” This was the language not of deterrence but of deliverance — an American president stepping in as Iran’s liberator.
Unlike in 1977, however, the loudest voices advancing this narrative are not in Tehran but in Los Angeles. The city where I live is home to the largest Iranian population outside Iran. On any given afternoon you can walk past Persian bookstores and jewelry shops, bakeries perfumed with cardamom and rosewater, satellite television studios broadcasting Persian-language news and entertainment. Exile here is layered: it lives in accents softened but not erased, in older parents who will never return home, in children who speak Persian imperfectly but carry inherited grief fluently.
I, too, carry that same inheritance. My family fled Iran in 1979 with little warning. We arrived in America with almost nothing. In the years that followed, we built new lives while navigating the suspicion and slurs that only intensified after the hostage crisis.
Back in Iran, clerical rule consolidated itself through fear and war. A generation was sent to the front lines in the brutal conflict with Iraq, boys barely out of childhood marching into battle. Prisons filled with political dissidents. Executions were carried out in the quiet of night. Women’s bodies became sites of state enforcement, policed in the street, disciplined in classrooms, punished for defiance. Students who gathered to protest were beaten or disappeared. Journalists learned that a single sentence could cost them their freedom.
Inside Iran, those decades forged endurance and a hard-earned familiarity with risk, patience and survival. Young people hosting underground parties in borrowed apartments, curtains drawn tight, music kept just low enough to avoid a knock at the door. Couples circling city blocks in slow-moving cars, stealing moments of conversation before morality patrols intervene. Women pushing their head scarves back a few inches further each year — an act so small it can seem trivial from afar, and so dangerous it can invite arrest, beatings or worse.
Outside Iran, those same decades led to something more volatile. In Los Angeles and other diaspora communities, anger at the regime runs deep, but so does an awareness of how easily that anger is folded into media narratives that blur criticism of clerical rule with suspicion of Islam itself. Iranian Americans have learned to condemn repression while bracing against the racism and reductive thinking that often follow. They carry two anxieties at once: the suffocation of the homeland and the caricatures of it abroad.
That tension has understandably bred impatience. Years of watching protests crushed and reforms reversed have made incremental change feel illusory. It is little wonder, then, that many have come to believe that only something dramatic — some outside force — could finally break the cycle of repression.
So when bombs fall on facilities linked to the regime, some in exile do not see escalation. They see possibility. They gather in celebration. There are flags, speeches, applause. Civilian casualties are described as tragic but unavoidable. The logic becomes arithmetic: whatever hastens the regime’s end is worth the cost.
But the cost isn’t theoretical; it has a face. Among the recent reports comes word that strikes have hit civilian sites, including a girls’ school. Children who have nothing to do with uranium enrichment or missile silos are being pulled from the rubble. Their deaths are disputed in numbers and spun in statements, but the moral fact remains: when you invite bombs as salvation, you are also inviting the deaths of innocents.
I understand the grief that drives many of my fellow Iranian Americans to this point. I, too, lost my country. I, too, have family still living under an intolerable regime. When you feel powerless to alter events from within, force from without can feel like the only remaining lever.
But Iranians have a long memory of foreign intervention, and it does not map neatly onto liberation. I was reminded of this during the women-led uprising in Iran in 2022. After the death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police, protests spread across the country under the rallying cry Woman, Life, Freedom. Women removed their head scarves in public. Students walked out of classrooms. Workers joined strikes. Teenagers filmed themselves confronting security forces in the streets. As usual, the response from the regime was swift and brutal — arrests, beatings, executions carried out after secret trials.
For Iranians abroad, the uprising stirred a volatile mix of pride, grief and helplessness. Diaspora communities filled the streets of Los Angeles, Berlin, Toronto and London in solidarity, watching events unfold in real time on their phones. The protests rekindled a powerful hope that change might finally come from within. But they also sharpened a familiar conundrum: how to support a movement for freedom without feeding the narrative, eagerly embraced by the regime, that such movements are merely instruments of foreign meddling.
At the time, I was on a book tour for a biography of an American who died fighting for Iranian democracy more than a century ago. The tour felt, in many ways, like the culmination of two decades I had spent writing and speaking about Iran from exile, trying to explain its history, culture and politics to American audiences. Much of that work has centered on a simple argument: that the best way to support Iranians struggling against authoritarian rule is not through isolation or military confrontation but through engagement, diplomacy, cultural exchange and economic ties that open the country to the world, giving the United States both leverage and responsibility in shaping the regime’s behavior.
Those views have never been universally welcome in exile communities. As a progressive voice arguing in favor of diplomacy, I have often been accused of naïveté or worse. When the women’s protests intensified and the regime’s repression filled our screens, several of my events were disrupted by well-meaning but inflamed activists, many of them apparently swept up in deliberate misinformation campaigns, who insisted that anything short of my full-throated support for regime change — by force, if necessary — amounted to complicity with the regime itself.
Ironically, the biography I was promoting told the story of a very different kind of American involvement in Iran. Howard Baskerville was a 22-year-old missionary from South Dakota who arrived in Iran in 1907 to teach English and preach the Gospel.
Two years later, when the shah attempted to crush the Constitutional Revolution — arguably the first democratic uprising in the Middle East — Baskerville left his classroom in Tabriz and joined his students on the barricades. He was 24 when a sniper’s bullet killed him. To this day he is remembered in Iran as a martyr.
Baskerville did not arrive with a mandate from Washington. He did not offer ultimatums or airstrikes. He chose solidarity over leverage. “The only difference between me and these people is the place of my birth,” he said shortly before his death, “and that is not a big difference.”
Half a century later, another American intervened in Iran: Kermit Roosevelt, a C.I.A. officer, who directed the 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Operation Ajax toppled a democratically elected government and restored the shah. It secured Western strategic interests, and planted a durable distrust of American intentions.
These two Americans — Baskerville and Roosevelt — represent the dual ways Iranians have experienced U.S. involvement: as a partnership or as manipulation. Americans ask, “Why does Iran hate us?” For them, the answer often begins in 1979. But Iranians ask, “Why did America take our democracy?” — and the answer begins in 1953. Each side selects its origin story. Each side feels wronged first.
History here is not context. It is fuel — invoked in speeches, taught in classrooms, whispered in homes. It shapes how every new intervention is interpreted. It determines whether a missile is seen as protection or aggression, whether a promise sounds like solidarity or betrayal.
When American leaders speak of helping Iranians “take over” their government, they are tapping into a powerful longing. Yet, as recent history reminds us, regime change delivered from the outside rarely produces the democracy imagined on the inside.
Iran’s political structure is not a single pillar that collapses neatly. At its core sits the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — a military-intelligence and economic network woven deeply into the country’s institutions. The I.R.G.C. is not simply an armed wing of the regime; it controls vast segments of construction, energy, telecommunications and finance. Its commanders oversee security, its companies distribute patronage, and its ideology frames resistance to foreign threats as a sacred duty.
An external attack is more likely to strengthen that apparatus than dissolve it, enabling the I.R.G.C. to recast itself as the protector of the nation. In such a scenario, even the most determined regime critics can be swept into nationalist solidarity. Iran’s political culture carries a deep sense of historical continuity and collective identity — a connection to a civilization that predates modern states and whose stories of resistance and martyrdom run deep. Of course, that dynamic is not uniquely Iranian. Any people, however bitterly they may resent their rulers, can rally when the nation itself appears under attack. When foreign bombs fall on cities, when homes are destroyed and children are killed, the line between opposition to a government and defense of a homeland can collapse.
It is for this reason that many analysts believe the most likely outcome of the American-Israeli bombing campaign is not the advent of liberal democracy but rather a shift in the regime’s center of gravity — from clerical dominance to military dominance. The robes recede, the uniforms step forward, and one tyranny replaces another.
Many of my fellow exiles who cheer the bombs falling on Tehran believe that anything — even military rule — would be preferable to what exists now. Maybe they are right. After decades of repression, the hope of sudden deliverance can make almost any promise sound plausible.
But let us not lose sight of the voice promising that deliverance. Mr. Trump is not any American president. He is a particular kind of political figure, one whose public language has revealed admiration for strongman power. He has praised a dictator as “very talented.” He has mused about the appeal of the phrase “president for life.” He has shown contempt for democratic constraints at home — dismissing courts, deriding norms and undermining confidence in elections.
This matters because Iran’s struggle is not only against a regime but against the concentration of unaccountable power. If the goal is accountable government in Iran, it makes little sense to place that hope in a foreign leader who has praised authoritarian rule and weakened democratic norms in his own country. The risk is not liberation but the reinforcement of the very model that Iranians are trying to escape.
It is a recurring mistake in modern Iranian political life — one learned painfully in the aftermath of 1979. We confuse the force that can topple a ruler with the force that can build a free society.
It is tempting, especially from exile, to imagine that Iran’s future will be delivered by motorcade or missile. But Iran’s fate will not be written in Los Angeles coffee shops or dictated by airstrikes ordered from thousands of miles away. It will not be scripted by exiled princes essentially claiming a birthright to rule or American presidents flexing their power on a global stage. It will be shaped by Iranians — those who remain inside the country, who protest, negotiate, compromise and sometimes revolt at enormous personal risk.
What that change looks like is impossible to predict. It may come not as a single dramatic rupture but as a gradual erosion: reforms wrested from below, alliances formed across ideological lines, clerics dissenting from within the establishment, labor movements gaining leverage, women continuing to push the boundaries of law and custom until those boundaries shift. It could take the form of a negotiated transition rather than a revolutionary overthrow, or a rebalancing of power within existing institutions rather than their collapse.
None of these paths are guaranteed. All carry risk. Nevertheless, durable change, if it comes, will most likely emerge from the slow accumulation of pressure inside the country, not from the sudden imposition of force from outside.
History does not always repeat itself cleanly. But it does offer warnings. And when the desire for liberation outruns memory, we risk trading one form of unaccountable power for another.
Here is what I know for certain: Iran is older than any regime that has ruled it — older than the revolution, older than the shahs, older than the foreign powers that have sought to shape its fate. Across three millenniums of poetry, philosophy, empire and renewal, this civilization has outlasted conquerors and kings, clerics and generals. It has done so not because a savior from abroad intervened but because its people endured — sustained by a fierce pride in their language and heritage, by a literary and intellectual tradition that has survived invasion and upheaval, by a collective memory shaped as much by resistance as by rule.
Iranian identity was not built by any single regime, and it has never depended on one. It lives in the Iranian people. And no matter what happens after the dust settles, they will outlast this regime, too.
Reza Aslan is a writer and scholar of religions living in Los Angeles. He is the author of “An American Martyr in Persia.”
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