Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, January 2, 2026
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1 comment
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
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The rioters in Iran are not just chanting about inflation or the collapsing currency. They’re chanting death to the dictator, and slogans in support of the Man Who Would Be Shah, Reza Pahlavi. Pahlavi is 65, so basically a teenager by the standards of 86 year-old Ali Khamenei. (Or Donald Trump.) Some of the rioters have guns, many have Molotov cocktails.
US and European sanctions and Israel’s dismantling of Hezbollah and the fall of the Assad regime, as well as joint US/Israeli air strikes, on top of corruption and incompetence, may have brought the country to a tipping point. The regime is discredited, revealed as militarily impotent and obsessed with a resource-wasting nuclear program and evidently pointless support for terror groups. But it still seems that James Carville also understands Iranian politics, because even there, it’s the economy, stupid.
Questions I have and hope someone has some ideas: Will foreign intelligence services start supplying weapons? Which foreign intelligence services? And where does an 86 year-old Ayatollah go if driven into exile? Are the Iraqis crazy enough to help him? If not, who’s left, Yemen and Russia? Who has the resources to help prop up a new government, should one emerge? And will it be China? Will Afghanistan and Pakistan try to carve out some chunks of eastern Iran? And won’t that be fun?
Reza Pahlavi has been quite open about reaching out to Israel. If the Iranian regime falls and Reza Shah becomes a thing leaving Israel without serious opposition in the ME, can anyone deny that Bibi Netanyahu will be seen in history as perhaps Israel’s greatest leader this side of Ben Gurion?