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[ 50 ] who lost america? The Case of Iran Whatever the reason for any puzzlement over the title of this essay may be, I hope to challenge it. We Americans are accustomed to asking, “Who lost Iran?” as in the past we have asked, “Who lost China?,” “Who lost Indochina ?,” “Who lost Nicaragua?,” and as in the future we may ask, for example, “Who lost El Salvador?” As long as this thought pattern persists we are apt to repeat similar questions about any country in which a regime friendly to the United States is toppled and American influence collapses as a result. The reason for this tenacious habit of thought is in part conceptual fallacy. Despite all the dynamic changes in international politics and economics since World War II, including the disappearance of Western colonial empires, the emergence of increasingly assertive new states within and outside the United Nations, and the inescapable realities of the dilemma of increasing interdependence and fierce independence, we have yet to shake off the habit of equating raw power with influence. Most of us still assume that the greater the power of one state relative to another, the greater the influence. In other words, it is simplistically assumed that the more powerful states necessarily control the behavior of the lesser powers. The corollary to this kind of thinking is twofold. First, it is always the more powerful state that loses its friend, ally, or, to use a more revealing characterization , client. By definition, clients lack influence over their patrons. They are “puppets,” “pawns,” or, to recall an earlier label, “satellites” within the orbit of a great or superpower. Whatever the label, these hapless and helpless creatures of the international system are wooed, won, and lost, all depending on the success or failure of the policies of their great-power partners. Second, by definition, any setback to the exercise of influence by the greater power must be its own fault. How could it be otherwise? Since the big powers supposedly control the destiny of the little ones, something must be wrong with their decisions , their policy process, or some other factor. This is why self-flagellation is a hallmark of American reaction to perceived failures, especially when a hostile “second-rate” power like Khomeini’s Iran, for example, inflicts “humiliation” on America for 444 days by holding “America in captivity.” “Who Lost America? The Case of Iran” was originally published in Middle East Journal 37, no. 1 (Winter 1982): 5–21. Who Lost America? [ 51 ] Ideological fantasies, no less than conceptual fallacies, also account for misunderstanding the nature of influence in the relations between a large and a small state such as the United States and Iran. The so-called globalists on the right blame the Carter administration’s human-rights policy for the fall of the anticommunist Shah’s regime and the loss of strategic Iran to the Free World. The former President, the globalists argue, should have used an “iron fist” to save the Shah. President Reagan, for example, said on October 17, 1981, “I don’t believe that the Shah’s government would have fallen if the United States had made it plain that we would stand by that government and support them in whatever had to be done to curb the revolution and let it be seen that we still felt that we were allied with him.” The President might find it difficult to understand that one of the causes of the revolution was indiscriminate American support of the Shah’s regime. The so-called regionalists, ranging from liberal reformers to leftist romantics , in contrast, blame the Shah’s downfall on the failure to uphold American democratic ideals in dealing with the Shah. They hold the Nixon administration responsible for failing to press the Shah for the democratization of the Iranian political system and for catering to the Shah’s “megalomania” by assigning him the role of the “protector” of Persian Gulf security and by promising him the sale of whatever conventional and sophisticated American weapons he wanted. What is remarkably similar in this and comparable views is that they all seem to share the same fundamental assumption about the unlimited nature of American influence over Iran. What is even more remarkable is that most Iranians also seem to share that basic assumption. The Muslim fundamentalists, the secular nationalists, the leftist Mujahadeen, the Fedayan, and the communist Tudeh Party too believe in...

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