Culture | Satan’s slips

The history of America’s relationship with Iran

It is a tragic chronicle of missed opportunities

When Nixon met the shah

America and Iran. By John Ghazvinian. Knopf; 688 pages; $37.50. Oneworld; £35.

FOR OBSERVERS of Iranian-American relations, it is comforting to learn that ties were not always so torturous. For most of America’s history, Iranians prized it as an anti-imperial power that had sloughed off European colonialism. They wooed it in search of an ally to check Russian and British ambitions. In 1854 the shah wanted to fly American flags from his merchant ships. On the eve of the first world war, Iran’s nascent parliament recruited W. Morgan Shuster, an American lawyer, to run the treasury, stave off grabbing foreigners and preserve Iran’s independence. When Cossack troops booted him out, crowds of Iranians waving the Stars and Stripes lined the streets to send him off.

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Alas, America’s bigwigs were largely uninterested. They liked Persian carpets and pistachios, but only missionaries really made the effort to visit. After the first world war oil proved more of an inducement—dressed up in President Woodrow Wilson’s lofty principles of self-determination. But even then few thought Iran was worth a showdown with Britain. Only after the second world war did the threat of communism persuade a president, Dwight Eisenhower, to get involved. In 1953 America joined Britain in toppling Muhammad Mossadeq, the elected prime minister, and reversing his nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian oil company. In return the shah, Muhammad Reza (pictured with Richard Nixon), let American firms handle 40% of the country’s oil.

Thereafter, as John Ghazvinian, an American academic of Iranian origin, tells it, America usurped Britain’s role as colonial bully. It turned the shah into a vassal who answered to the American ambassador, not his own people. He was America’s biggest arms purchaser and bought more British Chieftain tanks than Britain had in its own army. While professing support for the Arab oil embargo, he dutifully supplied Israel with half its oil during the war of 1973. To muffle cries for the restoration of democracy, the CIA (and Mossad) helped him establish the Savak, his secret police.

The Islamic revolution of 1979 that ousted the shah might have been a chance for change. Many in the West considered the clerics a lesser evil than the pro-Soviet communists who had just taken over in next-door Afghanistan, and were vying for power in Iran. But the abduction of 52 American diplomats for 444 days was too humiliating an affront to America’s psyche for relations to be normalised. In the new regime’s early years, American officials cut secret deals to supply the ayatollahs with weapons via Israel. But over the decades, instead of easing, the stand-off hardened.

Mr Ghazvinian recounts a tragic story of Iranian overtures spurned by Americans in cahoots with their Israeli and Saudi allies. When President Hashemi Rafsanjani offered to accept whatever deal the Palestinians made with Israel (so opening the door to implicit Iranian recognition of Israel), America shut Iran out of its Middle East peace conference in 1991. Jilted, Iran staged its own summit with Hizbullah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. A decade later, President Muhammad Khatami condemned the 9/11 attacks, proposed a “dialogue among civilisations” and let American jets bound for Afghanistan use Iranian bases. George W. Bush dubbed Iran part of his “axis of evil”.

In May 2003, two months after America invaded Iraq, Iran proposed a grand regional bargain, which included disarming Hizbullah. “We don’t talk to evil,” snapped Vice-President Dick Cheney, who suggested regime-change in Tehran instead. In 2009 Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Iran after 45 minutes of face-to-face talks about curbing its nuclear programme. A campaign of “spy drones, assassinations, explosions, computer viruses, economic warfare and oil embargoes” quickly followed. At last, in 2015 America and Iran agreed on a nuclear deal with other big powers. Donald Trump unravelled it.

Mr Ghazvinian has a witty style. “Bald, round and short, [he] seemed almost physically designed to serve as a political football,” he writes of one of the shah’s prime ministers. But his assertions can be too sweeping. “No serious person in Israel ever thought” a grave threat from Iran existed, he tenuously claims. Too often he downplays the role of spoilers within the Iranian establishment, for instance in sending a shipment of arms to Gaza in 2002, just as Mr Khatami was talking of ending hostilities with Israel. He dismisses the protesters who demonstrated against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rigged election in 2009 as “thugs” serving the West. Sadly, a book which promises to lift Iranian-American relations out of the mire of propaganda too often dives in.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Satan’s slips"

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