The Islamic Republic of Iran: the Genesis of its foreign policy since 1979.

• Author: Mottale, Morris M.

Iran and the United States

In February of 1979 an octogenarian charismatic Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini succeeded in bringing an end to the institutional monarchy in Iran and put an end to the last dynasty that had ruled an ancient land. The last shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, went into exile and died in Egypt sometime later. Iran under a theocratic regime embarked on a radical foreign policy that changed for decades Iran's relationship with its neighbors and with the United States. (i)

The history of Washington's relations with Iran in modern times can be really traced back to World War II. While it is true that the United States had relations with Iran before that period, it is World War II that brings America to play a central and crucial role in the international relations of the area. Two of the most important powers in the area had been Russia and Great Britain, and in fact the 19th century history of the area had seen a struggle for influence and hegemony between Moscow and London over the control of Iran. British domination of India made it inevitable for Britain to have an interest in Iranian affairs. In the earlier part of the 19th century, Russia managed to defeat Iran and seize part of its territory later to become Russian controlled Azerbaijan. As the British expanded their influence into Afghanistan and Baluchistan and into the Persian Gulf, the rulers of Iran came to confront two foreign powers that came to shape the international relations of Teheran and Persian leadership for over 150 years. (ii)

In the 19th century the ever increasing British preeminence in the area and its influence on Iranian foreign relations, and certainly Iranian imagination, shaped the dynamics of Persian nationalism and its perception of the world at large. Britain's role in Iran became even more pronounced as oil was discovered in 1908, following the successful search for it by a British businessman and oil prospector William Know D'Arcy. It iwa during this decade that the Royal Navy had decided to switch from coal to oil to power its warships. London had up to that point relied on American oil from Texas, and as America and Russia had become very large oil producers and exporters, British policy makers did not wish to be dependent on oil from countries that could potentially deny access to what had come to be a strategic resource. Thus the formation of the Anglo Iranian Oil Company and British investments in the oil industry in Iran made the area ever more important for London. Fear of German and Russian encroachments in the area gave London an ever greater interest in the strategic control of oil supplies. (iii)

Britain's role in Iran gave Iranian nationalists a pathological hatred for the British political presence in the area, and London came to be associated with perennial malevolence toward the Iranian nation. Iranian nationalism came to be buttressed by the Shiite religious antipathy toward Christianity and Western civilization. By 1925 Iran had come to be ruled by a new dynasty, the Pahlavi, whose founder Reza Shah embarked on a policy of military, economic, and social modernization which weakened traditional clerical and aristocratic control of the Iranian social, political, and economic system. On the eve of World War II, as Iran declared its neutrality, Britain from Iraq and the Gulf and the Soviet Union from the north invaded Iran to prevent a Nazi takeover, given the sympathies of many Iranians for National Socialism and Germany. It is worth remembering that Britain had also come to control Iraq, as that country, by 1941 had come to be controlled by a pro-Nazi, anti-British, anti-Western regime. In the 1930's the most appealing Western ideologies in the area were Fascism and National Socialism, and both political ideologies shaped Arab and Iranian nationalism for decades to come. Liberalism in the area had been a failure. (iv)

The entry of the United States into World War II following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor generated an alliance between London, Moscow, and Washington, that saw Britain and the United States needing Iran as a southern route for military and other supplies to the Soviet Union as it battled the Nazi invasion. The North Atlantic route that was instrumental for the delivery of American and British supplies to Russia through the ice free port of Murmansk had to be complemented with a southern access to the Russian front. The fear of a German and Italian takeover of the Near East by axis forces moving from Libya onto Egypt and the Suez canal and presumably to the oil fields of the area prompted British and American military planners to focus on an area that certainly for Washington had not been a strategic theater.

Reza Shah, the ruler of Iran, was forced to abdicate and his son replaced him. Mohammad Reza Shah, ruled Iran until 1979. Under his autocratic rule Iran became an ally of the United States, a central column in the American and Western containment of Soviet power and certainly an important strategic base for the United States in monitoring the military developments of the Soviet Union in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Iran also became the recipient of US military and economic aid. However much maligned, the Shah of Iran succeeded in modernizing the Iranian economic, social, and educational structure, and in fact by 1965, Iran along with Taiwan was the first country in the developing world to wean itself away from foreign aid. (v)

As British influence waned in the Middle East, America came to have an ever greater role and thus Iranian nationalism, nativism, and Shiite Islamic prejudices and hostility toward Christianity came to be focused on Washington. Internal Iranian power struggles saw Mullahs, leftist intellectuals and nationalists opposed violently to the Shah. He was forced into exile briefly in 1953 and returned with the help of the Iranian military and loyal supporters, as well as the British and the Americans intelligence service, through a counter-coup against Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh, who with communist support had been responsible for the brief exile of the Shah. The United States' primary interest in Iran, contrary to what many Iranian and American critics believed was not oil that was a concern for Britain. Washington's main interest was the prevention of a Soviet move and or influence in Iran. Iran by 1953 had the largest Communist party in the Middle East and possibly the third largest Communist party in all of Asia. The Marxist-Leninist Soviet model of development and its utopian elements appealed to large strata of Iranian intellectuals and nationalists. (vi)

The Shah began a systematic program of modernization, and by 1965 he had given women and religious minorities ever greater political rights. He thus encountered the venomous opposition of the clerics who had been losing power and influence as Iran became more secular and socially more liberal. The oil boom of the 60's and 70's...