When Hope Chooses Strange Allies: Power, Legitimacy and the Politics of Expectation

Sometimes politics feels like waiting for a socialist feminist revolution to be delivered by capitalists. The sentence sounds sarcastic, almost exaggerated, yet it captures a deeply human political habit: we often expect change from the very structures that benefit from the status quo.

I realised this while talking with an Iranian friend about Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah. For some Iranians in the diaspora, he represents hope — a secular future, stability, and perhaps an exit from decades of political stagnation. Yet history quietly complicates that hope. The Pahlavi name is inseparable from a period when Iran’s monarchy survived partly through Western geopolitical backing during the Cold War. The same international forces once associated with maintaining an existing order now appear, in some narratives, as potential facilitators of democratic change.This tension is not uniquely Iranian. It reflects a broader question in international relations: Who actually produces political transformation: power or legitimacy?

Realist thinkers such as Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz would argue that states do not pursue ideals; they pursue stability and strategic advantage. From this perspective, external powers rarely promote democracy out of moral conviction. They support actors who align with their interests. Political systems, therefore, are shaped less by values than by balance-of-power calculations.

Yet liberal political thought offers a different warning. Durable political orders cannot survive on external support alone. They require legitimacy — a sense among citizens that authority belongs to them. Institutions imposed or heavily engineered from outside often struggle because they lack emotional ownership within society. History repeatedly shows that governments may be strong without being accepted, and when legitimacy collapses, strength follows.

This creates a paradox familiar across modern politics. Societies facing authoritarianism or crisis search desperately for agents of change. Sometimes those agents emerge from unexpected places: former insiders, exiles, or figures tied to previous systems. Hope becomes pragmatic. Ideological purity gives way to the question, Who can realistically change things?

But hope and political structure do not operate by the same logic. Individuals hope forward; history moves through accumulated constraints.

The expectation that external actors or historically embedded elites will deliver democratic transformation often reveals less about geopolitics and more about psychology. In moments of uncertainty, people gravitate toward recognizable symbols, names, institutions, or alliances that seem capable of breaking deadlock. The choice is rarely irrational; it is human. When internal pathways appear blocked, even unlikely allies begin to look like possible exits.International relations theory describes this as a tension between external power and internal legitimacy. Sustainable change tends to occur when both align: when domestic social forces demand transformation while international conditions allow it. Without internal legitimacy, external backing appears artificial. Without power, legitimacy remains aspiration.

What makes this dilemma striking is that it extends beyond Iran, beyond any single country. It appears whenever societies hope that systems benefiting from the current order will voluntarily dismantle it. The contradiction is almost poetic: political change is often imagined as an act of rescue rather than a process of reconstruction.

Perhaps that is why the earlier metaphor feels so accurate. Expecting radical transformation from those embedded in existing power structures resembles waiting for a revolution to be delivered by its supposed opponents. Not impossible — but historically rare.

In the end, politics forces us to confront an uncomfortable reality: states act according to interests, societies according to hopes. Real change happens only when those two forces briefly, almost accidentally, meet.