The dinner question that still haunts Iran

A former French president’s private admission reveals the West’s original mistake—and why it still shapes the region

In 2006, I attended a private dinner with a small group of friends. It was not a political event, nor a formal occasion. Conversation was open, unguarded, almost disarmingly normal. By chance, I was seated next to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

We spoke about many things, France, leadership, time, culture, the strange way decisions outlive the people who make them. There was no sense of performance. No audience. No agenda.

At some point, almost without planning it, I asked him the question that shadows every serious discussion about Iran.

I mentioned Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the period of his exile in France in 1978, in the village of Neauphle-le-Château. Then I asked something simple:

If you had known what Khomeini would become once he returned to Iran—what the Islamic Republic would turn into—what would you have done?

He did not hesitate.

“I would have killed him.”

It wasn’t said in anger. There was no dramatic pause. It was spoken calmly, as a judgment about history rather than an emotional reaction. Several people at the table heard it as clearly as I did. I won’t name them—the dinner was private.

What struck me was not the brutality of the sentence, but its clarity.

To understand its meaning, one has to return to the late 1970s. Khomeini was not a mystery. His writings were explicit. His worldview was absolutist, revolutionary, and openly hostile to Western liberalism. He did not conceal his intention to replace Iran’s political order with a theocratic regime governed by clerical rule.

Yet Western leaders chose to misread him.

France granted Khomeini sanctuary, freedom of movement, and access to the global media. From French soil, he spoke to the world, coordinated political direction, mobilized networks, and shaped the revolutionary narrative. Exile was supposed to neutralize him. Instead, it amplified him.

The United States, under Jimmy Carter, viewed the Iranian crisis through a moral and legal lens—human rights, anti-authoritarianism, the assumption that removing the Shah would naturally produce something more pluralistic, more moderate, more manageable.

That assumption proved catastrophic.

Exile did not soften Khomeini. It gave him oxygen, legitimacy, and time. When he landed in Tehran, the window closed instantly. Executions began within weeks. Opposition was crushed. Women were erased from public life. The Islamic Republic consolidated power through repression at home and projection abroad.

Giscard d’Estaing’s remark was not an endorsement of violence. It was an acknowledgment of thresholds. There are moments in history when a single individual, at a specific point in time, carries a disproportionate share of future catastrophe. Khomeini in exile was such a moment.

Once that moment passed, every option became more expensive. Every correction required sanctions, wars, uprisings, and generations of suffering.

This is why that dinner conversation matters today.

The Islamic Republic is not an accident of history. It is the direct consequence of a failure of recognition in 1978–79. A regime born from ideological absolutism, sustained by repression, and projected outward through militias, intimidation, and strategic ambiguity.

Each time Western policymakers convince themselves that Tehran can be managed through engagement alone, they repeat the original error: treating a revolutionary theocracy as a normal actor that merely needs better incentives.

Some ideologies do not evolve through dialogue. They weaponize it. They interpret hesitation as weakness, tolerance as opportunity, and restraint as permission.

History does not punish intentions.

It punishes misjudgment at decisive moments.

France had such a moment when Khomeini was on its territory. The West had such a moment when legitimacy was still being negotiated and the future was still malleable.

Those moments passed. The cost did not disappear. It compounded.

That is what I heard, in one sentence, across a dinner table in 2006: not a call to violence, but an admission that the West’s greatest failure with Khomeini was not a lack of information.

It was a failure of recognition—when recognition still mattered.