It is a curious spectacle to watch the very corridors of the mainstream media – those same outlets that spent years treating Donald Trump as a pariah – now breathlessly pleading for him to intervene in Iran. They look to the Mar-a-Lago resident to perform a surgical miracle no American president has quite managed. Yet, if we are looking for the ‘cause’ of the current Persian catastrophe, we must look to the man who remains, in many ways, its architect: former president and peanut farmer Jimmy Carter.

By 1979, the Shah had proved to be not only the singular engine of Iranian modernisation but also the ruler of an increasingly powerful and influential Iran. Under him, Iran was a beacon of progress. His ‘White Revolution’ transformed a feudal society into a global power. He oversaw an annual economic growth rate of nearly ten per cent, skyrocketing per capita incomes, and the creation of a thriving middle class. Bringing education to the most remote villages, he raised the literacy rate from 26 per cent to 42 per cent in record time. He broke the back of the old, landed elites, turning 90 per cent of Iran’s sharecroppers into landowners. Many remember his 1974 Australian tour – the first by a Persian monarch – where he was hailed as a visionary leader of a rising superpower aligned with the free world. Unlike the Ayatollah, his presence here was not to firebomb synagogues and harass Iranian immigrants.

But in late-1978, Carter, possessed by a naivety that bordered on the criminal, decided the Shah was too ‘unrefined’ for the new era of human rights. He finalised his betrayal at the January 1979 ‘Big Four’ Guadeloupe Conference. France’s Valéry Giscard d’Estaing played a particularly duplicitous role, turning a villa in Neauphe-le-Château into an operations centre for the Ayatollah Khomeini to coordinate an uprising, and providing an Air France jet for a spectacular flight to Tehran. Britain’s James Callaghan turned the BBC into the Persian-language propaganda arm for the mullahs, while West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt looked on. Carter even dispatched General Huyser to persuade the Iranian high command to stab their monarch in the back and stay in barracks.

That there was a popular uprising in 1979 is a myth. The rug was pulled, and insanely, when Western leaders opened the gates for a criminal medieval theocracy in league with the communist Tudeh party. As soon as the mullahs took the reins, darkness fell. They began with the execution of the very communists who had served as their ‘useful idiot’ allies during the street protests.

Cannibalising the economy the Shah had built, Tehran became the world’s most prolific promoter of terrorism, yet the West continued to fund it. Barack Obama’s nuclear deal released a staggering $100 billion in frozen assets. Joe Biden unfroze billions more from sanctions Donald Trump had imposed. This wealth went directly to the corrupt mullahs and the evil morality enforcers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as well as terrorist proxies currently causing chaos from Gaza to the Red Sea, and even in the suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne.

Today, in January 2026, the mullahs are staring into the abyss. The decline accelerated with Israel’s precise retaliation for Iran’s attacks following the incursion by Iran’s terrorist proxy, Hamas, who committed the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Unlike his predecessors, President Trump delivered the pinpoint destruction of the mullahs’ dangerous plot to become a nuclear power. He recently issued a blistering ultimatum to stop state-sanctioned executions of protesters or face direct military intervention. The regime of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei claimed they had halted the hangings, yet the grim reality of the gallows continues in secret, with reports of mass executions in Evin and Gohardasht prisons. Human rights groups estimate the death toll has surged well past 16,000 – a genocide occurring behind a wall of digital silence. Morgues so overflowed that refrigerated meat trucks were repurposed to haul the bodies of the young. In the hospitals of Ilam and Tehran, the wounded are not treated; they are hunted. An estimated 8,000 Iranians now walk in darkness, blinded by the deliberate aim of the regime’s metal pellets.

In a desperate bid to hide the slaughter, the regime cut off the internet but, through Starlink satellite uplinks, the images of the revolution are still bleeding out. Other powers have scrambled to persuade Trump to hold back, but the President remains ‘locked and loaded’, viewing the regime’s lies as a final provocation.

Amidst this, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi has emerged not as a man demanding a crown, but as a bridge to a secular future. He has formally requested help from the free world through a clear, six-point mandate. This includes material aid for the brave protestors, shattering the regime’s digital iron curtain through satellite access, sanctioning the IRGC as a terrorist entity, targeting the personal, multi-billion-dollar fortunes the mullahs have stashed overseas, recognition of a Transition Council to give a legitimate diplomatic voice to the democratic opposition, and encouraging defections by calling for a safe passage and amnesty for security forces who refuse to fire on their own people.

The Crown Prince offers a sophisticated blueprint for the ‘morning after’, focusing on national integrity, justice without vengeance, and a final national referendum. He is offering the one thing Jimmy Carter took away: a choice.

Meanwhile, Iranians are emboldening Donald Trump to follow through on his threat of intervention. As an American armada steams toward the Gulf, young monarchist leader Danial Taghaddos recently invited Alexandra Marshall and me to present our experiences in the fight for constitutional monarchy to a powerful, peaceful rally at Sydney’s Town Hall Square. There, the air was thick with a cry now resounding across Iran: ‘Javid Shah – Long Live the Shah’. It is a sentiment that clearly terrifies the mullahs now hiding in Tehran’s Lavizan Bunker. Indeed, Ayatollah Khamenei is reported to have his bags packed and his loot stashed, ready to take the well-worn path of deposed tyrants to Moscow.

The darkness is lifting; the only question that remains is whether the West will finally help the Iranian people sweep this blood-soaked clerical occupation back into the Dark Ages where it belongs.