Exiled Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi appeared on Fox News's Sunday Morning Futures to make a direct appeal to President Donald Trump: help the Iranian people break free from the ayatollah's grip. His ask was specific — not vague diplomatic posturing, but a concrete list of measures designed to squeeze the regime where it hurts while giving ordinary Iranians the tools to fight for their own future.
The numbers Pahlavi brought with him landed like a gut punch. A minimum of 36,000 people were shot and killed by police in just the first two days of protests. At least 40,000 arrested. Over 330,000 wounded. Pahlavi himself acknowledged the difficulty of collecting accurate data inside a regime that treats information as a weapon — but even a fraction of those figures would constitute one of the most savage crackdowns on civilian protest in modern memory.
What made Pahlavi's appeal notable wasn't the emotion — it was the specificity. He didn't simply beg for Western sympathy. As Fox News reported, he laid out a concrete set of actions the international community could take:
"These are specific measures... that the world can [take to] put more pressure on the regime, but it will also show much more support to the Iranian people."
That last point matters. Pahlavi isn't asking the United States to invade. He's asking it to stop letting the regime operate with impunity on the international stage while its security forces gun down civilians at home. There's a meaningful difference between nation-building — which conservatives rightly rejected after two decades of failure — and denying a murderous theocracy the financial oxygen it needs to survive.
The "ghost tanker" detail deserves more attention than it typically gets. Iran's sanctioned oil doesn't just vanish. It moves through a shadow fleet of vessels with falsified registries and transponders switched off, generating billions in revenue that flows directly to the regime and the IRGC. Every barrel that reaches a buyer is a barrel that funds the apparatus currently shooting protesters in Tehran.
Cracking down on this network doesn't require a single soldier. It requires enforcement — the kind of enforcement that previous administrations talked about but never meaningfully delivered. President Trump has already signaled alignment with this kind of pressure. He said regime change in Iran "would be the best thing that could happen." That's not ambiguity. That's a green light for the kind of maximum-pressure strategy that actually shifts the calculus in Tehran.
Pahlavi has positioned himself as a transitional figure — someone who could galvanize and unify what he calls "the secular democratic opposition," to facilitate a democratic process under international observation. He's not claiming a throne. He's offering himself as a bridge between the chaos of revolution and the stability of self-governance.
"And finally, Iranians can have an opportunity to speak for themselves."
Whether Pahlavi can actually deliver on that vision is an open question. Exile leaders have a mixed track record, and the distance between a Fox News studio and the streets of Tehran is vast. But the underlying principle is sound: Iranians, not Washington, should determine what comes next. America's role is to stop propping up — or tolerating — the regime that's making self-determination impossible.
Pahlavi pointed to the Global Day of Action as evidence that the movement has real momentum, calling it an "unprecedented show of unity and support for one another." Hundreds of thousands reportedly rallied in cities around the world. The Iranian diaspora is enormous, motivated, and organized in a way it hasn't been before.
For years, the preferred liberal approach to Iran has been engagement — the diplomatic theory that if you give a theocratic regime enough economic incentive, it will moderate itself. The Obama-era nuclear deal was the crown jewel of this philosophy. It unfroze billions in Iranian assets. The regime used the windfall to fund Hezbollah, arm proxies across the Middle East, and tighten its chokehold on the Iranian people.
That's the track record. Not speculation — history.
Now the same foreign policy class that championed engagement watches tens of thousands of Iranians get killed, arrested, and disappeared, and their instinct is still to counsel patience and dialogue. At some point, "diplomacy" stops being a strategy and starts being an excuse for inaction.
The contradiction is glaring. The same voices that demand America "stand on the right side of history" on every progressive social cause go quiet when an actual authoritarian regime massacres its own people for demanding basic freedoms. The solidarity is selective. The outrage is curated.
A photo caption in the original reporting referenced the state tax building burning during protests in Tehran on January 19th — a snapshot of a country where ordinary people are setting fire to the symbols of their own government because they have exhausted every other option. These aren't radicals. They're citizens who watched the regime arrest 40,000 of their neighbors and decided the risk of action was smaller than the cost of silence.
Pahlavi's figures — even acknowledging the difficulty of independent verification inside a closed society — describe something that should command the world's attention. The regime's strategy is straightforward: kill enough people fast enough that the rest stop marching. It has worked before in Iran. Whether it works this time depends in part on whether the outside world does anything beyond issuing statements.
"But in the meantime, at least 40,000 people have been arrested. The number of people who have disappeared is yet to be completely realized. We had over 330,000 who were wounded."
The blueprint is on the table. The president has signaled his intent. The Iranian people have signaled theirs — in blood. What remains is execution.
