Nixon, Kissinger and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War by Roham Alvandi (review)

In November 1976, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the king of Iran, wrote a sternly worded letter to President Ford rejecting a White House plea to cap the high oil prices that fueled Iranian prosperity but that threatened American prosperity. “Nothing could provoke more reaction from us,” declared the Shah, “than this threatening note from certain circles and their paternalistic attitude.”¹

Oil prices were the most contentious but not the only source of tension between the two allies, as Alvandi makes clear in his enlightening new book, which offers a timely revisionist approach to one of the most misunderstood bilateral relationship of modern times. In his lifetime and in the decades since, the public image of the shah has been that of an American “puppet” or “stooge,” a brutally effective caricature that sharply influenced scholarly discussion of U.S.–Iran relations for at least the past generation. Not that the three principals discussed in this tome did themselves any favors. By engaging in secret diplomacy, and later refusing to explain their methods and decisions, Nixon, Kissinger, and the shah left the historiography of the era vulnerable to a raft of literature that was often as poorly sourced as it was speculative. Only with the release of thousands of declassified documents from the Nixon and Ford administrations have historians finally had the opportunity to assess a record that was once the preserve of sociologists, political scientists, and journalists.

The picture that emerges from the archives and collections is full of surprises and contradictions. It portrays the shah as a canny nationalist who brilliantly exploited American weakness in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal to establish Iran as the dominant power in the Persian Gulf and southwest Asia. In breaking from the client status expected of him, the shah threw down the gauntlet to U.S. policymakers, making it clear, to their consternation, that thenceforth he expected to be treated as an equal. This story, which is completely at odds with conventional wisdom, is highly complex and involved. Indeed, Alvandi is forced to concede that his work is by no means “a comprehensive history of the U.S.-Iran bilateral relationship in the 1970s.” His focus, rather, is on “three historical episodes that map the rise and fall of the Nixon–Kissinger–Pahlavi partnership”: (1) the Nixon Doctrine, which legitimized Iranian supremacy in the Persian Gulf; (2) covert cooperation to support the Kurdish uprising in Iraq; and (3) negotiations over the shah’s desire to obtain nuclear power for his country.

This structure suits Alvandi’s purpose. He points out that oil prices and arms sales have been intensively covered elsewhere. Nonetheless, neither of these issues can be regarded as entirely separate from the ones that the book covers. The shah’s nationalist rhetoric was never more apparent than on the subject of oil policy, which he regarded as critical to his regime’s survival, and bilateral differences on prices were an important factor in the malaise that permeated U.S.–Iran relations even before the outbreak of revolution. As scholars continue to sift through the archives, this book and others like it are challenging conventional thinking by offering a more rounded and mature discussion of U.S.–Iran relations under the last shah.