How Iran’s 1979 upheaval was less destiny, more disaster The accidental revolution

In The Atlantic’s thought-provoking essay on the 1979 Iranian Revolution, readers are taken on a sobering journey through the messy, unpredictable reality of how the Islamic Republic came to be—not as a historical inevitability, but as a product of hubris, miscalculation, and sheer chance. Drawing on Scott Anderson’s recent book King of Kings, the article pushes back against deterministic narratives and emphasises historical contingency over grand ideological explanations.

At the heart of Anderson’s account—and the article’s analysis—is a focus on missed opportunities, conflicting agendas, and systemic failures. The Iranian Revolution is reframed not as a preordained theocratic uprising, but as an accidental triumph by a coalition of revolutionaries—many of whom never envisioned a clerical regime—and a disastrous failure by the shah and his American allies. The regime’s longevity, the article argues, is not the result of ideological strength, but adaptability and repression, coupled with a prolonged run of geopolitical luck.

The article opens with a biting portrait of the Islamic Republic as a grotesque contradiction: a regime imposing bizarre religious restrictions on a largely secular, modernised population, ruling through fear and ideological rigidity in a country known for its cultural sophistication and pride. This tension—between a deeply nationalist, often secular public and a regime born of transnational Islamist revolution—is what makes Iran’s trajectory so perplexing. The central question then becomes: how did Iran, of all countries, end up like this?

In exploring this paradox, Anderson avoids sweeping cultural theories or overreliance on religious explanations. Instead, his strength lies in narrative storytelling: reconstructing the decisions and indecisions of key players in the final months of the shah’s rule. His main subjects are American diplomats, intelligence officials, and Iranian elites, including Queen Farah Pahlavi. The U.S. features prominently in the tale, not as puppet master but as a well-meaning, distracted power that failed to grasp the scale of the unfolding crisis.

The shah is cast as a tragic figure—blinded by his success, deaf to his people’s grievances, and increasingly paralysed by illness and paranoia. Meanwhile, the Carter administration is shown to be fragmented and largely absent, riven by internal contradictions and external distractions. Even as mass protests mounted and Khomeini's influence grew, Washington remained passive, out of sync with events on the ground. Perhaps most damning is the fact that no Persian-speaking American official attended Khomeini’s return speech in Tehran—an act of negligence emblematic of a wider failure to understand the revolution’s ideological centre.

Yet the article avoids turning this into a simple blame game. Anderson, and by extension The Atlantic’s reviewer, suggests that the revolution was less a master plan than a freak occurrence. Khomeini, they argue, simply outmanoeuvred his rivals—both domestic and foreign. The Islamic Republic was forged in chaos, not consensus.

The piece ends with a reflection on the regime’s current state: unpopular, economically broken, and ideologically bankrupt. As Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei nears the end of his life, the long arc of 1979 may finally be reaching its conclusion. Whether Iran’s luck turns for better or worse remains to be seen—but the myth of the revolution as destiny has been thoroughly dismantled.

By Vugar Khalilov