During his first term, President Trump made the prudent decision to designate the Islamic Republican Guard Corps. (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO). Since then, the United Kingdom and the European Union have faced mounting pressure to follow suit. That pressure intensified again last month after the Netherlands released an intelligence report detailing IRGC-backed assassination plots that have emerged throughout the western world in recent years.

Reza Pahlavi, the son and would-be heir to the dictator who was deposed in Iran’s 1979 revolution, has openly tethered his political fortunes to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. (IRGC). This military wing of Tehran’s regime was established by Ayatollah Khomeini. Its mandate is to protect and defend the Islamic Republic. As such, Pahlavi is most certainly an individual that the U.S. should not support. Doing so would usher in a prolific amount of frying pan and fire metaphors.

In a 2018 interview, Pahlavi declared: “I am in bilateral contact with the army, IRGC, and Basij [militia]. We are in touch. They declare their readiness and express their desire to align with the people.” He made no effort to reconcile that supposed readiness with the IRGC’s readiness to open fire on those same people -- something that would be put to the test the following year when Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ordered the speedy suppression of protests over an increase in government-set gasoline prices, leading to 1,500 deaths in the space of a few days.

Iran’s so-called crown prince made no effort to reduce his contacts with the IRGC in the wake of that crackdown, nor in the wake of the crackdown on the next great uprising in 2022, wherein another 750 protesters were killed. A study by the Iranian American associations in March 2025, pointed out that “almost all of Pahlavi’s senior advisors and confidants are individuals with past affiliations to the Islamic Republic’s intelligence or military apparatus -- and, crucially, to the IRGC.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently posted a “message to Iran” that underscored American awareness of the lethal support that its Islamist regime continues to provide to militant proxies in the surrounding region, including the Houthis in Yemen who have been carrying out indiscriminate attacks on commercial shipping since 2023.

“You know very well what the US military is capable of -- and you were warned,” Hegseth wrote on the same day as it was reported a fourth round of nuclear negotiations with the Islamic Republic had been postponed. “You will pay the consequence at the time and place of our choosing.”

The statement was obviously intended to highlight the threat of direct strikes on Iranian assets, but “consequences” can take many forms. The more immediate takeaway from Hegseth’s outrage could be that the White House might be reexamining its strategies in light of the persistence of Tehran’s malicious activities threatening the lives of American troops in the region, and the American people in general. This is an appropriate reaction to ongoing attacks from the Houthis and others, and whatever strategy the U.S. settles on, it should take direct aim at the institution most responsible for supporting those groups: the IRGC, the regime’s apparatus of terror at home and abroad.

Blacklisting the IRGC would make it effectively impossible for anyone in Europe or North America to transact with or associate with it. This would dramatically curtail its capacity to finance regional terrorism, suppress dissent inside Iran, and extend its reach abroad. It would also have the effect of impeding the current rise of one figure who presents himself as a symbol of opposition to the clerical regime.

Flawed logic says that Pahlavi, the son of the Shah, is the ideal replacement, based on the troubling premise that the people now killing Iranian civilians in defense of the “Islamic revolution” might one day help to overturn the very regime that defines itself by that revolution.

His affection for that institution is unsurprising, given his family history. The rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was buttressed for many years by a secret police force, SAVAK, which is easily viewed as a prototype for the IRGC. The latter is worse on account of its bold and frequent attempts to extend the suppression of dissent far beyond Iran’s borders, but the U.S. and its allies should aim to confront the IRGC and anyone supporting it for both of these reasons: because of the threat it poses to American and global security and also the threat it poses to the Iranian people and Iran’s future.

That future cannot be determined by the existing regime, and so President Trump and Secretary Hegseth are right to threaten and cajole Tehran as part of a broader strategy of “maximum pressure.” But Iran’s future cannot be determined by its former repressors, either.

So, while maximum pressure on the mullahs’ regime naturally goes hand-in-hand with support for Iranian opposition activists, it is vital to recognize that Reza Pahlavi is not an appropriate object of that support. The narrative that Pahlavi promotes an alternative to the theocratic dictatorship is simply a fiction.

President Trump has already taken the lead in designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization. Several U.S. allies should stop misguided diplomatic consideration and should follow suit with their own terrorist designations. Such efforts to undermine the IRGC will create space for pro-democracy voices inside the Islamic Republic to assist the international community in challenging the regime more generally. But those efforts would be made all the more powerful by an underlying recognition that the Iranian people deserve a vision for the future which moves their country forward. Pahlavi’s vision does nothing of the kind.

Chuck Wald is a retired U.S. Air Force general and former deputy commander of U.S. European Command.

Image: Gage Skidmore