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

In this excellent account of U.S.-Iranian relations during the administrations of Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, Roham Alvandi offers “yet another example” (p. 3) of how the Cold War was shaped by Third World “client states” that found ways to manipulate their superpower partners. For Iran, the turning point was the Nixon Doctrine, with its devolution of responsibility to regional allies. The Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, astutely seized the opportunity to transform his country from client to partner, making Iran the linchpin of regional stability from the U.S. perspective. As Alvandi’s careful account shows, Iran wielded significant influence over how the United States chose to fight the Cold War in the Middle East.

Following a chapter on U.S.-Iranian relations in the early Cold War—a period when the Shah complained of being treated like a “concubine” rather than a wife (p. 46)—Alvandi shows how the Iranian leader capitalized on the Nixon Doctrine to position Iran as the leading U.S. ally in the region. Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, had sought to uphold regional stability by relying on both Saudi Arabia and Iran. From 1969 to 1972, the Shah’s persistent lobbying persuaded Nixon to tilt toward Iran. One outcome was the removal of almost all restrictions on U.S. arms sales to Iran.

Nixon and the Shah had long been friends. As vice president under Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon met the Shah in 1953 and found him admirably tough. The two kept in touch during Nixon’s wilderness years after he lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy. By the time Nixon returned to office in 1969, the Shah’s power, confidence, and ambitions had grown. The monarch pressed the new administration to throw its support behind Iranian primacy in the Gulf, and Nixon eventually agreed. Alvandi makes a strong case that Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, lacked a grasp of the region and its politics and were swayed mainly by their friendship with the Shah, allowing their personal sensibilities to trump the advice of their regional experts. The Shah’s assistance in facilitating arms transfers to Pakistan during its civil war in 1971, a move that Kissinger admitted was illegal, was among the factors that contributed to the White House’s growing reliance on the Shah.

Chapter 3 offers a close, poignant look at the U.S. intervention in Kurdistan in the years 1972 to 1975. Alvandi’s account of this story, well known in its outlines, offers a comprehensive examination with new details based on fresh evidence. At the urging of the Shah, who wanted to use a Kurdish insurgency in Iraq as leverage against the Ba’thist regime, Nixon and Kissinger ordered the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to work with Iran and Israel to funnel money, supplies, and arms to the Kurds. Alvandi convincingly shows that the Shah was the driving force behind this intervention. Nixon and Kissinger ignored the recommendations of their own advisers and accepted the Shah’s self-serving story that propping up the Kurdish insurrection would stave off a Soviet threat to the region. In 1975, when the Shah signed an agreement with Iraq, he pulled the plug on the Kurds, leaving the Peshmerga fighters to flee to exile in Iran, where more than 100,000 Kurds became refugees. Of those who returned to Iraq, many were shipped south in a resettlement program aimed at “Arabizing” the north. Kissinger said the Shah’s sudden abandonment of the Kurdish fighters was “brutal” (p. 117), but he acquiesced in it without a word of dissent. Alvandi concurs with the Pike Committee’s assessment that Nixon and Kissinger were “Iran’s junior partners” (p. 123) in this episode, effectively serving Iranian interests.

The importance of the personal rapport between Nixon and the Shah is underlined by Alvandi’s final chapter...