Sitting down to write about the horrific and gut-wrenching political and social crisis in Iran forces me to confront trauma I have carried for decades.

As a child, I witnessed the Iranian Revolution from Washington, D.C., where my father was serving as a high-ranking Iranian diplomat. Our family, like countless others, was swept into a historic upheaval from afar—powerless to intervene, yet forever shaped by its consequences. Like many Iranians in the diaspora, I grew up suspended between two worlds: the Iranian culture into which I was born and the American society that generously embraced my family when we could no longer return home.

While we were in the United States, my father was sentenced to death in absentia. His property was confiscated and nationalized solely because he had served under the Shah’s government. The newly established Islamic regime went on to execute many of my father’s friends and colleagues, driven by fear that educated, principled individuals might one day challenge their authority.

These events were incomprehensible to me as a child. They remain haunting as an adult.

I was forced to grow up quickly. There was no alternative. My childhood—like the childhoods of so many Iranians, including those now struggling to survive inside a devastated Iran—was stolen by exile, fear, and violence.

Recently, while visiting my ill uncle in France, I spoke with Iranians who had supported the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Now older and financially secure, they told me they had “made a mistake.”

Those words struck me like a bullet.

That “mistake” has destroyed five generations of Iranians. It has condemned some to a slow death in exile, consumed by isolation and heartbreak, while subjecting others to imprisonment, torture, and execution in present-day Iran at the hands of the same regime once welcomed as a promise of justice.

Because my family was involved in Iranian politics not only during the Pahlavi era but also dating back to the Qajar dynasty, I am often asked who I believe should lead Iran in the future. This is not a question that lends itself to slogans or shortcuts.

Iran is a deeply complex nation—rich in culture, art, resilience, and kindness, yet fractured by decades of repression and ideological violence. Whoever emerges as its next leader must confront a country that has been politically, morally, and spiritually dismantled. The scale of suffering inflicted by the Islamic Republic is such that Iran’s future leadership must offer more than political competence; it must provide moral clarity and national reconciliation.

Is Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah, capable of bridging this divide? Can someone without formal governing experience unite a nation that must simultaneously rebuild its institutions, heal its collective trauma, and resist further fragmentation?

These are not questions for those of us observing from a distance to resolve.

They belong to the people of Iran, who have endured a living nightmare for more than four decades and who alone have earned the right to decide their future.