President Trump’s military campaign against Iran raises a most urgent question: what kind of successor regime is possible, and how will that regime attain legitimacy? Only with a legitimate, economically rational regime can Iran prosper, yet the triple temptations of Islamism, authoritarian socialism and hopeless government corruption may well seduce an inexperienced electorate into error, even if that electorate is asked properly. The solution is a monarchy, which should ideally have an indefinable aura of majesty in the eyes of its people. While ideally no autocrat, that monarch can act as “umpire” ensuring that the worst ministers are removed and corruption limited. In Iran, the plausibility test is passed by Reza Pahlavi and the historic grandeur test equally so by his dynasty. Accordingly, President Trump should work to restore the Peacock Throne.

The United States’ Middle Eastern interventions have an unhappy history. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. occupiers chose between possible “democratic” politicians and engineered for them to win elections. As a result, both countries indulged in an orgy of corruption as well as being wholly ineffectual against various terrorist groups that sought to remove U.S. domination. In the long run, both wars were lost, but only after the U.S. had spent trillions of dollars and thousands of U.S. lives, not to speak of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan lives in a futile multi-decade occupation.

In Iraq, there was no alternative to this – other than staying out in 2003, which would almost certainly have produced a better outcome (or finishing the job in 1991, which would have opened up far more possibilities in a country then more recently downtrodden). The Iraqi King Faisal II had been killed in a 1958 coup and was the heir to a monarchy only 37 years old which had been imposed by the British using a Saudi chieftain – the ruling family had no connection to Iraq’s distinguished long-term history.

In Afghanistan, on the other hand, there was a clear and much better alternative available. Mohammad Zahir Shah (1914-2007), the King who had been deposed in 1973, had ruled for almost 40 years before his deposition and his reign was remembered as a period of peace and prosperity. He was also descended from the Barakzai dynasty that had ruled Afghanistan independently since 1823. Although in his late 80s when the U.S. invaded, he thus had both an excellent track record and full regal legitimacy. It was a crime against civilization that the loathsome George W. Bush administration was so besottedly committed to republicanism that it imposed fly-by-night, corrupt politicians over the only man who might have made a success of their occupation. Regrettably, such a restoration is growing ever more distant; Prince Ahmad Shah Khan, the King’s second son and oldest surviving male heir, died near Washington in 2024.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, (1919-80) Shah of Iran from 1941 to 1979 was a truly admirable ruler in a very unpleasant part of the world. Once he had got rid of the leftist coup-wannabe Mohammad Mossaddegh (1882-1967) in 1953, possibly with the help of the CIA, he embarked on a program of free-market economic reform, the “White Revolution” that trebled the living standards of his people, to a level far above the miserable secret police-ridden subsistence under which they have since suffered. He also positioned Iran deftly as a reliable ally of the West, yet one that worked to overthrow the cartel underpricing of oil that had persisted during the 1950s and 1960s through domination by the giant Seven Sisters oil companies, with their subservience to U.S. and European political wishes for cheap oil.

At its peak in March 1974, the global oil price rose to $12 per barrel, equivalent to a mere $82 today, based on U.S. inflation, only slightly below today’s elevated level, which has been reduced by the immense technological advance of fracking. In other words, the Shah, who was the principal force behind the 1973-74 rise, had restored an equilibrium to the world oil market that had been artificially suppressed by the greedy United States and Europe.

In the West at this stage, the Shah was regarded as an infinitely rich superman, an example of which is Punch’s pastiche job application by John Betjeman for the post of Iran’s Poet Laureate (by Ernest Sackville Turner (1909-2006) in the issue of March 27, 1974, still fondly remembered by me 52 years later):

Shahanshah! Anointed Reza! Prince upon the Peacock Throne!
Scourge of all the Grasping Nations! You can have me for your own!
Star of Shiraz! Lord of Meshed! Conquering Lion of Abadan!
If you need a new Court Poet, send at once for Betjeman!

Betjeman, the new Firdausi! Omar! Hafiz! Three in One!
Odes of every kind accepted, no commission left undone!
Mosques defended! Tombs befriended! References from Princess Anne –
Shahanshah, you won’t regret it. Give the job to Betjeman!

Betjeman (U.K. Poet Laureate, 1972-84) would probably have taken the Shah’s job; his annual fee for the U.K. Laureateship was £200 plus a butt of canary wine, thought good money by John Dryden (Laureate 1667-89) when he was appointed by Charles II, but sadly devalued by Betjeman’s time.

Inevitably the Shah overspent his country’s new riches on poorly managed infrastructure projects, the oil price fell back and by 1977-78 Iran was in crisis, with frequent violent demonstrations against the Shah’s rule. At that point U.S. President Jimmy Carter got involved; not only did he not back the Shah properly with U.S. military support, but he virtue signaled incessantly about human rights, and may well have conspired with the CIA to remove the Shah. Consequently, the Shah felt unable to subject the rebels to the “whiff of grapeshot” necessary to suppress them, but instead was forced out, to be replaced by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, (1900-89) who was welcomed by the New York Times with a fawning editorial “Trusting Khomeini” and named Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” in 1979. Ordinary Iranians have suffered ever since.

Democracy is a cultural construct. Even in the West, where it was invented, the one-man-one-vote version of it has a dreadful tendency to subject the populace to lengthy dark interludes of poverty, decline, repression or warfare when the electorate gets it wrong. In the Middle East, it has never worked, save as a fig-leaf of legitimacy for a lengthy period of authoritarian dictatorship such as that of Turkey’s Recep Erdogan (Prime Minister 2003-14, President, 2014 to today and counting). The U.S. attempts to impose democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan produced nightmares of corruption, bad governance and internal civil war. There is no reason to suppose that imposing a phony democracy on Iran would work any better, complete as it would be with corrupt “democratic” politicians with no legitimacy eager to steal their way to an early retirement.

Only where there is an active democratic tradition does it make sense to restore free elections. Even then, borderline cases such as Venezuela, where the only economically competent governments have been dictatorships, suggest that it is no automatic road to success. Venezuela’s economic management was atrocious well before Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998; its oil revenues provided endless slush funds for successive leftist governments and prevented a viable private sector from emerging (by making wage costs too high, for one thing).

Walter Bagehot (1823-77) in “The English Constitution” defined monarchy as the “dignified” part of the constitution, as distinct from the elected and administrative “efficient” part. That was not entirely true when Bagehot wrote it – Queen Victoria played a major “efficient” political role at several points in her reign – but it is truer now, although the British monarchy since Elizabeth II’s death has done its best to seem neither dignified nor efficient. In countries where the quality of government is lower, a monarch can play a more active role, training the elective politicians to serve the people rather than their offshore bank accounts. In terms of power, the ideal Third World monarch is a George III, politically very influential and able to dismiss unsatisfactory governments (such as the Fox/North coalition in 1783) but nowhere near absolutist.

In an ideal world, President Trump would restore the Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi to the Peacock Throne, helping him to design a constitution with a fairly strong but not absolute monarchy. Over time, the monarch could train the politicians, removing any that were damagingly socialist or super-corrupt, and then retreat to a more purely “dignified” status.

With the Persian/Iranian monarchy dating back under various dynasties to Cyrus the Great’s (600-530BC, Shahanshah 559-530BC) accession of power more than 2,500 years ago, it potentially has plenty of “dignity” to satisfy its populace. Like the British Royal Family, its history, buildings and pageantry can also provide a rich source of upmarket tourist revenue, a useful diversification from oil. (I wanted very much to go there in the 1970s, but alas revolution intervened before I became rich enough to afford the trip.)

The Iranian people should be allowed to grow rich and happy, and a restored monarchy is the best way to achieve this.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)