Lawfare Daily: Beyond the Headlines: A History of U.S.-Iran Relations

non-imperialist. And for those people who actually bought it to study American history, they saw this was a country that had come into existence less than a century earlier with a big revolution against the British Empire. So you can see why on multiple levels, the United States was really appealing to Iranians. It's the law for podcasts. They're oriented by public service fellow here at Laugh Fair, and with Zhang Tasvania today, he is the author of America

and Iran, a history 1720 to the present. To me, what's always very important is to recognize

that for the vast majority of the history of these two countries, they have actually been very not just friendly, but have had a great deal of mutual admiration, mutual fascination, you know, a really warm, if sometimes idealized, ideal of each other, and that the last 47 years is actually the anomaly. Today, we're going to zoom out of the ongoing war with Iran, and U.S. Iran policy to talk about U.S. Iran relations and their history.

John, I want to start by talking about your vantage point as a historian of the relationship and what the sort of origin story of this relationship is, because when you ask most Americans, where this history begins, it often starts with 1979, and the hostage crisis, for many Iranians,

“I think, you would probably hear 1953, and the coup, which we will talk about, but for you,”

how does it all start? Your book starts in the 1700s. So what should folks know about this history zooming out a little bit from the ongoing tensions? I came to the topic as an Iranian-American who was curious about the history between these two countries, basically, as someone who was a trained historian and a former journalist, I thought I had some kinds of skills to bring to this, but I think fundamentally I came to this with curiosity, as I think everyone or many people,

I guess many of us who are around in an American at the same time, and have some curiosity about the extremely fraught and extremely tense relationship between these two countries, we ask ourselves questions about, well, why how did this begin? And as a historian, of course, particularly curious about the origin stories, the beginning, everything as a history, how did this start? So I will be completely honest and say that that was kind of where I came from on this,

“and I think that it's kind of the question that I get a lot from people as I was working on the book”

as well as since the book has come out, which is okay, help us understand why these two countries hate each other so much, what's going to happen, where is it all going, who started it, you know, what's the problem, you know, which is, well, we're a very reasonable question to ask, anytime there is a conflict, it is natural to us, well, who started it, who's fault is it?

But the problem is history doesn't really work that way, and I don't think it's a really useful

way to approach history, you know, so what I was trying to do was to ask, what I thought were maybe deeper questions. So for example, when you ask yourself, well, who started it, who's fault is it, where did it all go so wrong? There were a lot of other questions that are embedded in that, which is, for example, first of all, there's the assumption that history is some sort of courtroom drama, where somebody needs to educate, where judge duty needs to come along and say that's your fault

“you need to pay so, and so, this much for the damages that you cause, history is not that simple.”

But I think also embedded in these questions is this idea that if everything went so wrong, that perhaps things were great at one point, maybe things weren't so bad, and so then I'd become curious about, well, if we're asking ourselves, you know, where did it go wrong, maybe we should ask ourselves where did it go right? Or did it ever go right? Was there ever a golden age of USU-run relations? These are all the kinds of questions I was

trying to grapple with this in this book. And of course, there's something quirky, perhaps, about going all the way back to the beginning of the 18th century. You know, we don't typically think about this as a 300-year relationship. And there were reasons why I went back that far. You know, I found, as a historian, my first question was, well, where do I begin this story? And you mentioned 1973. These are two huge dates in the history of USU-run relations.

And I think I would, I think at this point, we can say that 2026 is the third big date in USU-run, really, in the history of USU-run relations. We'll almost certainly go down in history that way. But I'm going to start, I want to get to Adam myself. Looking back, those are the two big dates, right? But I think I had a bit of an issue with this, because you're right. For a lot of, not just Americans, but I think for people who fundamentally have a favorable view of the United

States and foreign policy, I think is a better way of saying, and a fundamentally critical and

negative view of Iran or the Islamic Republic, it is natural to want to begin the history in 1979, because that's when the Islamic Revolution, the Iranian Revolution took place when fanatical students got a little out of hand and took the American embassy hostage and held its employees hostage for a well over a year and brought about, eventually, the rupture in diplomatic relations between these two countries. So it's easy to say, that's where it all went wrong,

become this evil terrorist state at the heart of the Middle East that has done nothing but

“cause havoc and destruction of the USU-run relationship in addition to other things as well.”

Fight, perfectly reasonable narrative to have. There is an equally reasonable narrative that a lot of Iranians have, or shall we say, people who are less sympathetic to American foreign policy and more sympathetic, perhaps to the Iranian nationalist narrative, which is 1953, which is the year in which a CIA backed coup brought down the very popular elected government of Muhammad Masad. The Prime Minister of Iran, who had committed the great sin in the eyes of the West

of nationalizing the Iranian oil industry and saying that Iran's oil profits belong to the

Iranian people. It's a very popular position for 1950s, sort of third world nationalist to take,

but it was of course extremely unpopular with the British oil company at the time. The Anglo-Ironian oil company, which later became British petroleum, will be P as we know it today. So for a lot of Iranians, or Iranian nationalist, the story begins there, and there is this idea

“that everything was fine until the CIA came along and overthrew the government and then caused”

that helped the Shah at the time, the king, to solidify his rule, which became increasingly dictatorial through the 1950s and 1960s, increasingly reliant on American support, and of course resulted in the famous blowback or backlash of 1979, and that is a perfectly reasonable narrative to take as well. But both of these narratives assume this kind of perfect idyllic past, right, this pre-lapseary and kind of perfect paradise. Again, we all know that U.S. Iran relations

before 1979 were not perfect. They relied on a state-to-state relationship between the United States and a deeply increasingly unpopular and dictatorial and quite ruthless monarchy, and we also know that before 1953, although this is often more vague to people, but we know that U.S. Iran relations work perfect. It was perhaps more innocent time, but a lot of people forget that the U.S. and Iran actually first broke off relations in 1935, because of a dispute that grew out of a speeding ticket

that was given to the Iranian ambassador in rural Maryland, in a town called Elkton, Maryland. So, you know, things were far from perfect. So, I wanted to go back a bit further and say, well, where should we begin this history? Should we begin it with diplomatic relations in the 1880s, the first exchange of ambassadors? Sure, but then you're writing a purely diplomatic history,

purely political history, and relations between countries are not always just political and

diplomatic. So, I thought I could maybe start the history as some people do in the 1830s with the first arrival of Presbyterian missionaries in Iran from the United States, people who went there to build schools and clinics and also to proselytize Christianity, to proselytize the locals into Christianity. But I thought, you know, what about sort of prehistory? I mean, there is a prehistory sometimes, even before people come into contact with each other, the kind of preconceived notions that they

haven't each other. And I discovered much of my surprise that colonial American newspapers as early as the 1720s were obsessed with Iran. And I'll sort of stop there and say,

“that's why I took the history as far back as I did. Okay, well, now I want to hear about”

those newspapers. And, you know, what were they saying about Iran or Persia at the time? Yeah, I'll just sort of win my put the word Persia and Persians into a search engine, at the time, look, try and look into these colonial newspapers and I didn't expect to find anything. But what I found was that these newspapers were full of stories about Persia as they called it at the time.

Sometimes a quarter or as much as a third of the newspaper was news about Iran.

And I thought, this makes no sense to me. Why in the 1720 to 1725, 1724, our newspapers published in colonial Philadelphia and Boston that come out once a week and there are three pages or four pages, why do you have a whole page about Iran? The very beginning, you had, you know, I even came across one newspaper from 1724 that said, whose lead story said, we regret that we have no news from Persia this week. That was the headline story in colonial North America in 1724. The leading

story in the newspaper was, we're sorry we have no news about Iran this week. Now, that is a little strange. And there are reasons for this. Some of it is just pure coincidence. The very, very first printing presses that started producing weekly newspapers in colonial North America in 1720, happened to be in early 1720s and the big international news story of the day in 1722 was the collapse of the Persian Empire, the one of many Persian Empire throughout history. The last,

really big kind of glorious Persian Empire, the Safavid Empire. And it was at the hands of these Afghan rebels who were rebelling it because the Persians were trying to force them to convert from Sunni to Shia Islam. And the Americans, the colonial Americans, are concettlers at the time, mistakenly believed that because it was the Sunni Shia thing, that therefore the great Sunni evil empire of its day, which was the Ottoman Empire, as they saw it, must be somehow putting the

window into the psyche of colonial North Americans before they ever came into contact with Iran,

“which was that the great evil empire of its day was the Ottoman Empire. Now remember in 1722,”

it had only been about 40 years since the Ottoman Empire in 1683 had actually come to the gates of Vienna. So from white settlers of North America in the 1720s, who saw themselves as Europeans as British subjects. This was the great threat to Christendom, to European Christianity, the Ottoman Empire. And so they saw the Persian Empire, which they knew had been fighting wars with the Ottomans for years, and in some, in many cases, those wars had a sort of subtle Sunni Shia kind of rivalry

embedded in them as well, that they were somehow, the enemy of my enemy was my friend. And the Persians were just to the east of the Ottoman Empire. They were seen as more exotic, more oriental, less Muslim. You actually, I mean, had newspapers at the time saying, this is the holy war between, quote, "Muslims and Persians," which is a very interesting way of describing it, right, as if somehow Persians or Shia Muslims were somehow not as Muslim or even

not Muslim at all. There's a lot of wishful thinking. You know, they even tried to explain to the readers the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam. Not very well, sort of said that the Shia Warship Ali, which is not quite right. But, you know, they were trying, and this was really

“important to them for some reason. And the reason they had to do with the biblical inheritance as”

well, because in the Bible, the Persians come out looking much better than the Babylonians, and so there's a lot of this kind of stuff was overlaid into all of this. I don't want to, you know, get into too much detail of this right right now here. But fundamentally, this idea that the beyond the evil empire of the east, beyond the Arabs and the Turks and the Ottomans, just to the east, there was a more idyllic, more beautiful, more oriental, more, you know, kingdom that was left

hostile, less Muslim. Somehow, I would argue that that mentality stayed with Americans right through the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, because as late as the 1970s, you could see on American television Iran being described in this way. You know, you had the Arab oil embargo, and these evil Arabs and their socialists, and they want to destroy Israel, and they want to like keep oil out of the international markets, and we're all having to queue up at gas lines and they're there. But just

to the east, you have this nice idyllic char, and here's this glamorous wife, it's Empress, and so on, and they love America, and they're anti-communists, and they're all these things that we want them to be. You can, and I won't do it here, but you can draw a straight line to connect those dots from the 18th century all the way to the 1970s. So we've talked a little bit about how Americans perceived Persians, Iranians, you know, throughout the kind of the several centuries that you

you study, what does it look like from the Iranian perspective? How are Iranians or before that Persians, I guess, seeing this nascent country, the, you know, revolution, the kind of like the civil war,

“and all of the events that follow bring us up to, let's say, 1945, what, how are Iranians seeing things?”

It's funny because there's an exact parallel. They also had this idyllic view of Americans. It's hard for Americans to understand this today, but until, well, throughout the 19th century, and even into the early 20th century, in some parts of the world, including Iran,

the United States was seen as basically a European country. A country that was to the far

flung Western fringes of Europe, even after the American Revolution, there was a lingering kind of psychological view of the United States. It's fundamentally a very, very distant Western European country, kind of like Iceland or Greenland, right, sort of far flung way out to the West, but still basically part of European civilisation. In the 19th century, so the Iranians came to this a bit later than the Americans, because in the 18th century, in the sort of 1700s,

when these American newspapers were coming out, Iranians didn't really think very much about America. It was called the Yankee Donyada, the New World. It was seen as this land of cannibals and savages and so on. Much as much as it was described in a lot of the European literature as well, the time. It wasn't until Iran began to really decline as a power in a sort of 1820s, 1830s, 40s, 1850s, 1860s, that Iranians started to become a bit more curious about the United

States. There were several reasons for this. One is that Iranians felt themselves to be the inheritors of a kind of a great empire, but recognized that they were increasingly much weaker than the European great powers of the time, particularly Britain and Russia, which were both interfering a lot in Iran in affairs and putting a lot of pressure on it. I remember Iran was a sovereign

country at this point. It was never colonized by Britain or by Russia formally, but increasingly

from throughout the 19th century, in the south, the British exercised huge sphere of influence in Iran, even if they can call it that, and the Russians did the same in the north. Iranians

to feel very resentful of this European sort of soft imperialism. At the same time, they recognized, listen, these guys are onto some things that we're not. They have better weapons,

they have more dynamic economies, they have more dynamic politics. We are basically a decaying

eastern civilization. This is the way they saw it. We need to learn some things from the Europeans. Otherwise, we're going to lose this battle. We're just going to get taken advantage of it. But they didn't like learning things at the losing end of a gun barrel. Nobody likes that. So when they looked at the United States, they saw basically, as they saw, a European country that had all of the nice things that they liked about, or that they felt they should be learning

from, from Europe, better technology, more dynamic economies, etc, etc. But without the imperialism and the gritty, what they saw when they looked at Americans in the 1830s, 40s, 50s, 60s, the only experience they had with Americans was Presbyterian missionaries who were building schools and clinics.

“And yes, kind of talking about Jesus as well. But at this point, they were pretty low key.”

The missionaries didn't try to proselytize the majority Muslim population, mostly because it would be a penalty of death for trying to do that. So instead, they tried to proselytize Iran's very small Christian and Jewish communities. Or excuse me, christian communities. I have my apologies. They largely left the Jews alone as well. But they tried to proselytize Iran's very small Christian community, which they felt

followed a kind of deformed decaying version of Christianity that had been inherited from kind of Eastern Christianity centuries earlier. So we're talking about the Armenians, the Assyrians, Caldeans, who they referred to kind of disparaging we as an historians,

followers of Nester from the fourth century. Basically, they looked, the American Presbyterians from New England,

looked at these guys and thought they are real Christians. They need to be exposed to a better form of Christianity. So they showed up and Iran, but they were very indirect about it. Instead of trying to go out there and Bible-fumping, what they would do instead was build schools, clinics, promote literacy and modern hygiene and things like that. And hope that they would, by doing this, they would uplift the conditions of local Christian communities. And then,

eventually, the Muslims and the Jews would also look at these and say, oh, these guys are doing way better than we are. Maybe we should think about Christian here as well. I mean, it was a very

“convoluted road and a very low key kind of approach to missionary work. The reason I say is”

because, ultimately, what that meant is that they didn't really convert anyone. I mean, they

converted a couple hundred people. The missionaries were there for a century, from 1835 to 1935, and that hundred years they converted a grand total of about 200 people to American style, Presbyterian Christian. What they did that had way more impact was the schools and the clinics, and the uplifting of people's lives and the kind of positive impact that they actually ended up having a lot of ways. So, when Iranian reformist and nationalists looked at Americans in the 1830s,

40s, 50s, 60s, they didn't see the US still had no embassy in Iran, right, which was unusual, because they were angle conditionaries from England as well. And they were, you know, they were orthodox missionaries from Russia. But they had embassies, governments were backing up what they were doing. And so the Russian and British missionaries and the French missionaries as well came across to be Roninans as sort of fifth columnists, sort of tools of their government. Whereas the

Americans were just, you know, these kind of innocent, kind of scrawny, you know, school teachers from, you know, Amherst, Massachusetts, that were like, you know, trying to help teach people about vaccines, or, you know, give them literacy or translate the Bible into, you know, to a Syrian. And the American government had no interest in Iran. So, from the very beginning, the US developed this reputation in Iran as being hands-off non-imperialist. And so those people who

actually bought it to study American history, they saw this was a country that had come into existence less than a century earlier with a big revolution against the British Empire. So you could see why on multiple levels, the United States was really appealing to Iranians. You know, they saw it as this anti-imperialist country, this kind of hands-off, low-key, kind of harmless Western European country that had all the things they liked about Europe and none of the things they didn't like.

And the reason I'm going on so much about this is because this also mentality remained with Iranians throughout the 1950s, educated Iranians especially throughout the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s.

“And that's what was last in 1953. Well, how am I going to massage that himself? The Prime Minister,”

the great nationalist Prime Minister who was a hero to Iranians who was overthrown by the CIA in the 1920s. You should see the wonderful things he had to say about the United States. He was a great nationalist who hated the idea of any kind of foreign interference. But when Morgan Seuss-Truster, the financial advisor, was sent in 1911 by the American government,

to Iranian nationalist because he stood up to the Russians and so on. 10 years later,

“when Iran's constitutional government wanted to actually bring another financial advisor,”

a lot of people said, we need to bring back sushi, we need Americans, et cetera. Masada was a great nationalist and he said, we don't need, we need to get our own finances in order. We don't need foreigners coming and doing this, but if anyone, you know, if we have any kind of warm feelings towards any country, it's the United States. Even as late as 1953, when Eisenhower was giving his approval to the coup that was going to overthrow Masada three weeks later,

you know, he wrote a letter to Eisenhower, yet no idea any of this was being planned. But the British were sanctioning Iranian oil and they were starving the Iranian economy and

it was the Eisenhower that Masada chose to write to. Because even at that late moment,

three weeks before he was overthrown by the CIA, he believed that if there's one country that would understand Iran's plight, it would be the United States. And that says a lot about the lingering attitude that Iranian nationalists had over the 100 years or so from the 1840s through the 1940s. So I do want to pause briefly on the Schuster comment because I do think that it is really fascinating. Actually, it's a really nice vignette to maybe flesh out just very briefly a little bit. You know,

he wrote this book called "The Strangely God Pursa," which is very much kind of from an American perspective talking about how Persa at the time is stuck between these great powers that you've been describing. In your research, is this something that other Americans were seeing where was this kind of like a personal perspective from one guy who just happened to be there or is this something that you see come up a lot in kind of the writings that you've read from the missionaries and others

who were who spent time in Persa and then in Iran? Yes, to some extent, the Presbyterian missionaries did a lot of, you know, they would come back home to fundraise and they would sort of give

“little presentations about Iran and you know why you should give us more money because they're”

going all the good work we're doing that. And in the process, they were kind of educating Americans about Iran. But I would actually argue that Schuster played a fundamental role in transforming the American American ideas about Iran. Before Morgan Schuster, Americans had almost no idea about Iran. I mean, they had these very kind of outdated orientalist ideas or biblical ideas about it or classical personal ideas about the Persian classical Persian Empire. But in 1911, when after Schuster was kicked

out of Iran by the Russians, because he, you know, he was sent by President Taft as part of a kind of goodwill mission to help reorganize Iran's finances. And so on, he became very popular among Iranian nationalists because he said the fundamental problem is British and Russian imperialism. And he kept trying to help any faculty Iran needed to stand on its own feet and so on. And he became very popular, but he became very unpopular with the Russians, who basically even

invaded Iran and booted Schuster out of the country. And as you left the country, his motor car that was leaving Tairang, you know, the route was lined with people waving American flags. I mean,

but when Schuster returned to the U.S., this is the part of the story that doesn't always

get appreciated. He became a kind of national celebrity. He became the first celebrity plundit on Iran in the United States. You know, there was a stampede in Philadelphia to hear him speak. The police had to get called out with barricades. You know, and he was at the Carnegie Hall the day before. I mean, it sold out. You know, I mean, it was, it was, everyone wanted to hear what Morgan Schuster had to say. He was a young, kind of good-looking guy, you know, who kind of,

within all the magazines at the time talking about Iran, how it was being strangled by these British and Russian imperialists. And so when he came out, everyone wanted to hear what he had to say.

“And, you know, after that, you know, there was a, I think it's possible to see a kind of a”

little spike in sort of American, to some extent, orientalist, yes, but kind of American kind of fantastical ideas about Iran and what a beautiful country it is. And, you know, how it's, that people want people want to learn more about it. And the national geographic started to do some more stories about Iran and so on in its early days. So I think Schuster played a pretty fundamental role in that. Okay, so we've talked about a couple of centuries, going back a couple of

centuries, I'm going to come back to post 1945. So, you know, and the aftermath of World War II and in both wars, we should just kind of briefly say that, you know, Persia and then Iran was dragged into the conflict because of the kind of, you know, the influence of the various countries that we've talked about, the brids, the Russians, et cetera. So what happens in 1945, you have a new king who ends up being the last king, right? Reza Muhammed Reza Palavi, who takes over, he tries to

continue the modernization work of his father, part of that is kind of building that relationship with the United States. What does that relationship start to look like from 1945 until 1953?

that Iran and the US had not really an alliance, but that's a separate story. But what, yeah, what are the tension points that exist there? What is the relationship look like? So Muhammad Reza Palavi, the last king of Iran, came to power in 1941 and the beginning

in the middle of the Second World War. He more than any other king, more than any other leader in

Iranian history, by far, no comparison, had a very, very close relationship with the United States.

“To understand why, you have to, I think, understand his father's reign a little bit, his father,”

Reza Shah Palavi, who was king from 1926 to 1941, came to power as his kind of great nationalist king who wanted to reduce the role of, you know, the British in Iran, in particular, these Russians had already kind of taken themselves out of the game a little bit after the Soviet revolution, they had said that they were going to stop interfering in Iran in affairs. So the British were really much more influential in Iran than 1920s. Reza Shah ended a lot of the

British concessions by 1927, built this kind of militaristic Iranian state, you know, but he was a ruthless dictator, this is the Shah's father. In the 1920s and 1930s, there's very unpopular by the end of his reign. When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Reza Shah declared Iranian

neutrality, Iran had always been a neutral power and it was technically neutral in the first

world war as well, although no one actually respected that neutrality. For the first two years, the Second World War, the allied powers, the US, the Soviet Union and UK kind of tolerated Iranian neutrality, they didn't really care enough, but as they needed Iran's oil more and as their the German presence became much more noticeable in Iran informally, but there were a lot of German spies running around in Iran in 1939-40 and then as the Western Front got closed off to the

Soviets by Hitler in 1941, suddenly Iran became strategically much more important because Reza Shah had built a railway connecting the Persian Gulf and the south to the Kaspian Sea and the North, which for the Americans who were trying to get lendally supplies from British positions in

“the Persian Gulf up to their Soviet allies in the Soviet Union and Russia, the only way to do that”

now, the only other way to do that was either through the Northern Route around Archangel, you know, the extremely cold, more than route or through Iran using the Transurranean Railway. So for all of these reasons, the allies demanded that Reza Shah declare, or enters neutrality and join the allies, or else, he said no, Iran was invaded by the Soviets from the North and by the British from the south and Reza Shah was overthrown and sent him to exile in 1941. His son,

Muhammad Reza, comes to power in the shadow of all of this, in September of 1941, as a 21, he's about to turn 22. He just seemed what's happened to his father. His father, who 15 years earlier had said, "Oh, we're going to boot the British out, and we're going to declare our, you know, we're going to be much more stand on our feet, much more, and build this great emp of the great military." And he did, he built one of the largest armies in the Middle East,

and so none of it actually made any difference. When Push came to Shah of the British and the Russians just moved in within three weeks, occupied Iran and removed his father different power.

So the Shah never, the younger Shah never forgot that lesson. He said, look, he looked around,

he said, "Look, you can't anger the British and the Russians and the British and the Soviets." Like, you know, these are the, these are great powers of their day, but what we need is a third ally, one that we can sort of wave in their faces. And this was not new. This was actually a kind of an unofficial part of Iranian foreign policy dating back to the 1860s, 1840s, really. And Ami Khabir, and, you know, you know, after that in Shah of the 1840s and 50s, just part of their policies.

Well, it's why the Iranians first started to get interested in United States. But the culmination of this in 1941 was the new young Shah saying, "We need a strategic alliance or relationship, I guess, with the United States." The United States is the great, up-and-coming power of its day. It's clear that the British Empire is spent after this war, and they were, they were bankrupt after the war. The Soviets, you know, have their own issues. But if we have, if we are close friends

with the United States, the British and the Soviets won't mess with us as much. And he was right about that to some extent. Because, you know, when the Americans entered the war, they forced the British and the Soviets to sign a tripod agreement that promised that they would, they would

“vacate Iranian soil within six months of the war. Which ended up becoming really important,”

because the Soviets turned out not to want to vacate Iran within six months of the war. In fact, and so the Americans had to really pressure them to do that. So from the very end of the war, in 1945, the Shahsees, the US relationship was strategically very important to the United States. He's young, he's untested, and the Americans are also very grateful to have him as a kind of anti-communist leader. Because as soon as the war ends, of course, the US suddenly

values regional allies like the Shahsees Iran. And this becomes more and more important throughout

“the 50s and 60s and 70s. So now let's talk about 1953. So, you know, the young Shah has a”

little over a decade to kind of get settled. And then you have the famous events or infamous events we should say of 1953. You mentioned briefly that it had to do with Iranian oil being nationalized. Tell us a little bit more about the events that lead to the the coup itself and the US role in the coup because it doesn't actually start with the United States, right? It starts with the US ally. So how did we end up in this moment that essentially becomes a defining moment in this

relationship? Absolutely. I mean, the story of 1953, of course, is pretty well known and lots of people have written about it much better than much more authority than I have. But, you know, the short version is that by the late 40s and early 50s, Iran does a new generation of young educated middle-class Iranians who are really passionate about the idea that they should control

“their own oil resources and their own money. And their hero is a guy named Mohammed Masad that”

he was a parliamentarian. And he is elected Prime Minister in 1951 on an explicit platform of nationalizing the Iranian oil industry and kicking the British out because they had had a monopoly on Iranian oil since 1997. And Iran had seen almost no money from 50 years of almost 50 years of British oil exploration in Iran. Despite having one of the largest reserves of oil in the world, and Iranians were pretty fed up with this. And Masad made this his kind of cause. But he was also a great democrat

and a great believer in self-determination and that Iranians should not just control their own oil money, but they should also control their own destiny as a people, which meant that he was not a huge fan of absolute dictatorship. He was a monarchist. He, you know, like any mainstream politician of his day, he was absolutely loyal to the monarchy. But he felt that the Shah, the King, should rain and not rule. In other words, he should become a kind of constitutional monarch in the European

tradition. Masad that himself was a trained constitutional lawyer who had been, you know, who had received his education in Switzerland and in France. And he was a great admirer of the Western constitutional legal tradition. It's might be of some interest to your kind of legal listeners.

He was really the first Iranian to receive that kind of training in the early 1900s, actually.

And he was an old man by the time he became Prime Minister in 1951. But he became a hero to these young Iranian liberals and nationalists who felt he wanted more democracy, more say, more popular participation. And he wanted, you know, the British out and he wanted, you know, Iranian control of Iranian assets. He became Prime Minister in 1951. Immediately the British felt the government of Winston Churchill felt that he, this was not acceptable, because within three weeks of Masad

becoming Prime Minister, the parliament passed a very popular nationalization bill. And the British then fought an epic battle over the next two years with Masad with his government trying to your imposing sanctions and military blockades and so on trying to starve the Iranian economy and etc etc etc. They kept trying to convince the Americans to join in this because in 1952, Masad gets wind of the fact that the British are actually plotting to overthrow him.

And he breaks off relations with the United Kingdom. He says, you know, this is not what diplomacy should be about. And he closes the British embassy, kicks out all the British diplomats and you know, so on. And so the British are now no longer in a position to be able to overthrow him. And they try to convince the Americans to do it instead. And in 1952, the United States is still led by Harry Truman and his government and his administration is dead set against the idea of a

kind of imperialistic kind of dirty tricks campaign to overthrow a foreign government. State Department run by Dean Atrison at the time was famously full of kind of, you know, sort of newing them liberals who didn't really, you know, who was striding anti-communists, but believe that the way to fight communism was by, you know, giving, you know, giving people more, you know, kind of more bread and, you know, less, you know, fewer weapons, right?

This idea of, you know, we needed more social welfare programs and education and health care and things like that. And that would make people less willing to turn to communism. The Republicans

“famously had a completely different approach, which is that the only way to defeat communism was to”

build up the third world government's militarily to avoid any kind of Soviet invasion

and then worry about kind of, you know, internal domestic development. It was just two very different ways of seeing those. So when the Republicans finally came out of the wilderness in 1953, they remember they had not, you know, held the White House for more than 20 years. And when Eisenhower

and the sort of McCarthy era of elapsed with this, the Churchill's government saw that they had

“a fellow traveler. They had someone who they could talk to you in the United States. And they”

immediately got to work on the incoming Eisenhower administration and tried to convince them that Mossad there was flirting with communism, which he absolutely was not. He was a stride and anti-communist. But he was, he had a big tent. I'm kind of a big umbrella for his governing coalition. And, you know, that included all all matter of leftists as well as, you know, religious conservatives and so on. Long story short, they, the incoming, the Dallas brothers, the head of the CIA,

and the State Department, John Foster, Dallas and Alan Dallas, we were very much open to this argument and they convinced President Eisenhower that Mossad was not to be trusted and that a free-wheeling, very open, very liberal democratic government in the country like Iran was going to be inherently unstable and could inherently be manipulated by the Soviets and that Mossad had to go. And so they put into Operation AJAX, which had been basically a plot that had been fed to them

by the British. And the CIA did the dirty work of the British for them and what that meant was that

the United States was never forgiven over the next 25 years and the Shah was for the next quarter

century of his rule was seen as a basically as an American puppet, as a guy who owned his throne to the United States and to the CIA. That reputation never left. Which might have been fine, had he not also gradually drifted towards autocracy and dictatorship and human rights abuses by the many activities. So now you had a very popular dictatorial government that was seen as overly pro-American as well and of course that had famous repercussions for the United States and

Iran. Before we actually talk about that period and then the revolution briefly, you know, what have the things that's been really interesting to me watching the war play out is the amount of kind of commentary around the 1953 coup that is being, you know, it's almost become a meme right in many circles where people talk about, by the way, Iran had this democratic government we overthrew it and this is basically the extent of what people tend to say about it.

“On the other side, I think on the right you've seen folks write about what we have gotten wrong”

historically about 1953 and perhaps we've overplayed the role of the United States in the kind of scholarship on the topic. Can you briefly kind of, you know, a pine on the different, you know, what do people get right and what do they get wrong about 1953, what are the myths that are sort of floating around this notion? Yeah, you know, like everything else in the history of U.S. Iran relations quickly becomes very political, particularly everything around the mid-20th century.

It's very difficult to talk about these things in neutral fact-based ways because

the reality, which is the CIA play a critical role in the overthrow of a partner they liked

in the Prime Minister of Iran in 1953, is inconvenient to a certain narrative. I don't think it needs to be. I think if you look, if you're a di-hard supporter of rather a patty of you and you want to bring the monarchy back to Iran and you want regime change and you're supporting the idea of Trump bombing Iran and doing all this, you can do all those things still acknowledge that the CIA played a critical role in the office of Robert Bussadeck in 1953.

I mean, if I want to put myself in the shoes of someone who feels that way, it's not difficult. To simply say, yes, we did that. It wasn't a great idea. It brought about, you know, actually delayed Iran's democratic developments and it, you know, it helped us solidify this and consolidate kind of royal dictatorship and that led on fortunately to the Islamic Republic. But, you know, a lot of time has now gone by. Since then, it's no longer 1953.

You know, those lessons while they're important, I should not immediately inform our policy and we should still bomb Iran and, you know, bring Result Palabita Palabita Palabita Palabita. That's not, to me, that's a perfectly coherent intellectual argument. I don't know why, someone who is a di-hard supporter of the former monarchy should feel threatened by the simple reality of 1953. But again, unfortunately, as you know, whole too well,

debates around Iran and U.S. Iran relations just very quickly become strident and irrational. And that means that even to this day, there are people out there who may name names, but who go around masquerading as the German-serious historians who tried to portray the 1953 coup as an event in which the United States had no meaningful role whatsoever, which is simply

“absurd. I think you can debate the degree and the decisiveness of the CIA's actions perhaps.”

You could argue that, you know, Masada might have fallen under his own way anyway or this that would be the other thing. I would disagree with that, but I think that's a reasonable position to take and you can have reasonable discussions about this. But I think the overwhelming preponderance and historical evidence, and again, there are people who have looked at the stuff way more closely than I have, but the overwhelming preponderance of historical evidence,

including documents that continue to get declassified year after year after year,

neo-obstroy episodic of 1950. So, now let's talk to the revolution itself. You started to kind of paint a picture a little bit, right? That the shock resumes power in 1953, and he becomes more and more kind of autocratic, and builds this whole kind of internal security apparatus to crush the scent and also invest a lot in the military. And then 1979 begins to happen. You have a revolution that kind of brings together these different

factions that were essentially only unified in their initially and their opposition to the

shan, then ultimately you get the Islamic Revolution out of it. Can you talk briefly about the

drivers of the revolution, and then what was the US approach to their evolution? As the United States is watching these events unfold, what is the thinking in Washington? The drive is very simply, I mean, there are many, there are cultural ones, or economic ones, or social ones,

“there are religious factors, there are all kinds of factors. But fundamentally, I think to”

closely oversimplify this, the shards and his father. I mean, the power of the last two kings of Iran, 1926 to 1979, fundamentally prioritized the modernization quote unquote of Iran in a very western lines, by which they meant factories and railways and military strength and air force and things like that. And yes, things like literacy and health care campaigns as well,

and even with varying degrees of success. But in kind of redistribution land redistribution

campaigns and things like that. But the one thing they didn't do was, but they didn't believe in modernizing Iran's politics. They didn't think that if they believed that you could have modernization in every way and uplift the material condition of the Iranian people, while still telling them that they couldn't really participate in political decision making. The feeling even

“in the 1970s, you can see it in all the interviews that the Shah gave to 60 minutes and so on”

in 1970s, he simply didn't believe his people were ready for democracy. He didn't think that that something they wanted or needed that they loved their king, that they loved their government, because he was making their lives better. And he was dragging them into the 20th century and was

giving them an increasingly European way of life. And so it turned out to be a catastrophic mistake

that you ended up with an increasingly educated, knowledgeable, informed public. That was increasingly frustrated by the fact that it was living under a dictatorship and that it had no mechanism for addressing that, because it couldn't create political parties and many meaningful sense or newspapers or what have you because they saw what had happened every time they tried to do that. So you had three nodes of opposition to the Shah about the end of the 1970s. There were kind of hardcore leftists and

“Marxists, communists who were becoming increasingly radicalized. I mean Iran had a huge communist”

parties dating back to the 1920s and 30s, but it was largely a pro-Soviet party, the two did it. By the 1970s, they had been largely discredited among young people in Iran who were much more likely to follow kind of Maoist guerrilla groups, similar to like, you know, the Red Bugade, sort of, you know, bottom line half gang, and you know, very classic of 1970s kind of, you know, guerrilla groups. You had increasingly a religious conservative opposition, which was very new in

the 1970s. I mean, religious radicalism was unheard of, completely unheard of in Iran before the 1970s. You had small, I mean, I say on heard of, they were small, you know, kind of, you know, these kinds of like, you know, sort of largely obscure kind of, you know, radicals who would blow things up and so on. But it has a movement when you're saying, right, there were a daily system, but not as a movement. Yes, and it was very small. Even the I told of Khomeini was not particularly

well known in 1960s and 1970s. He was increasingly well known to his followers, right, but they were outside them. They were in the sort of in the fringe of Iranian society. But by the 1970s, they were getting more and more radicalized smuggling cassette tapes for his sermons, while he was in exile in Iraq. And so on. So now you have these, these leftists, radical, now it's, you have these like religious radical, all these young people running around

on university campuses getting into fist fights with one another. And then in the middle, somewhere in the middle, you have these kind of liberal nationalist, the kind of air, the musadette, the kind of people who believe in democracy, and political parties, and petitions, and things, and having poetry reading, and things like that. And they were Democrats, and they were, you know, these were the people that should have been pro-Western, right.

But these were the people who, you know, they were largely an aging generation of activists from the 1950s who felt, you know, what we tried to do things by the rules we tried to like play by,

the United States came in and over through our government. So they were largely, so for young people, this idea of like liberal Western democracy just didn't have a lot of purchase in the 1970s. It was all about religious radicalism, or leftist, you know, kind of Marxist radicalism. And the irony is that all three of those groups, for different reasons, hated the United States,

“by the 1970s, leftists just naturally did, because that's what leftists do.”

You know, the religious radicals did as well, because they saw, you know, the United States is the beacon of kind of decadent Western symphalness in American movies, and so on. And the Shah was like the epitome of that problem, the government and everybody around, you know, the kind of sick offense that were surrounding the Shah's, who were very pro-shar kind of elements in the 1970s. These were, you know, kind of the wealthy elites of Tehran, you know, society,

were largely pro-shar, and so on. And they hated these guys, because they were basically, you know,

wealthy Western cosmopolotans. And then the liberals, the liberal Democrats in the middle, who should have naturally been pro-Western and pro-American, were still kind of angry about 1953. And that was a terrible combination for the Shah and for the United States, because it meant,

“you know, you had this ruler who was increasingly hated and dictatorial, who was associated with the”

US, and all of the different types of opposition to his rule, all kind of associated him with the US and kind of hated the US for different reasons. So when the revolution came about, it was a revolution against the Shah, and his dictatorship, it wasn't a revolution against the United States. But it was very easy for the Iatola Khomeini, who nursed the religious leader, who was in exile, who nursed a longstanding hatred of the United States to become this kind of unifying figure, who was seen as the

only person who could unify the opposition and overthrow the Shah. And in fact, that's exactly what happened. But after the revolution surprised the price, all of these different strands fell out with one another, and there's a long complex history of the early 1980s of how they were all

crushed, basically, by Khomeini and his closest supporters. And that helped us cement

the Islamic and the Islamist nature of the Iranian revolution. So revolution happens, and then we have the hostage crisis, right? That is 444 days of the US embassy staff into Iran being held hostage by this group of students, militants, activists, and you know, it's also, as we said at the outset, one of the kind of big events that shapes the way Americans see Iran and US Iran relations in part because the hostage crisis gets, you know, it's at the beginning essentially of the 24-hour

new cycle. And so a lot of people are watching the news on fold every day. They're checking in to see what's going on with the hostage crisis. As the hostage crisis is going on, you also have the start of the Iran Iraq War, which goes on for eight years. It is a very complicated policy decision for the United States on what to do with this war. And I'm quickly walking through these because I want to kind of reset us in 1988. It's the end of the revolution, the hostage crisis, the Iran

Iraq War. What is the status of this relationship at the end of this, with this kind of new generation of Iranian leaders? I guess they're not that new anymore at that point, they're a decade essentially in. But where do things stand at the end of the 1980s? I mean, in 1980s, in the Iran Iraq War,

“it was a massive collective trauma for the Iranian people. In a way that I think we in the West”

don't know if I'm appreciate, because you know, we don't see that war as being particularly about us. But Iranians and Iraqis, I mean, went through eight years of absolute help, and lost hundreds of thousands of people. The savage trench warfare, sort of first world war style, you know, trench warfare, chemical weapons, all of that. And they came out the other end, steeped in blood and trauma and suffering. But also the revolution had been consolidated fully, and of course, of the Iran Iraq War.

Because in 1979, '81, you know, not everyone in Iran supported the idea of an Islamic revolution, the revolution itself was pretty popular, but not the Islamist direction ended up taking. But very quickly, all of that was all of those internal discrements were overshadowed by the fact that Iran had been invaded in September of 1980 by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And the receptionary Iran was at the US, sort of given a green light. I mean, this is all debatable. But just Saddam Hussein

to invade, whatever the case, fast forward eight years later, and Iranians have been through absolutely hell. And the Islamic Republic is fully entrenched. A year later, the Ayatollah Khomeini,

the Revolutionary Leader dies, and the Constitution is amended, and some additional changes

are made to consolidate the Islamic Republic. And there was a new Supreme Leader. Someone who seen this much more pragmatic and much more politically savvy in some ways than Khomeini. And that's

a night until a couple of weeks ago when he was killed in the US military operation.

“So in the 1990s, there's a whole new generation of Iranian leaders. And the Cold War has come to an end”

as well, which which has effects in every country's politics. A lot of the old leftists kind of reinvented themselves and Iran went in a more kind of capitalistic, neoliberal kind of direction to try to attract foreign direct investment from the west and so on. And began to open up a little bit financially, economically, financially, as well as politically and culturally to the west, famously in the 1990s. And there were some real opportunities there for some data on,

with the west. I mean, there was a new, very popular Iranian president elected in 1997. Mohammad Khatami, who really tried to liberalize Iran's culture. And it's politics to some degree.

He was ultimately not successful in doing that, but he really did a lot of outreach to the west.

He famously proposed a dialogue among civilizations and traveled to Europe and all of that. And there were some early contacts with the Clinton administration as well.

“Didn't quite work out. So then your George Bush W. Bush gets elected and becomes president in 2001.”

September 11 happens. Iran under Khatami sees this as an opportunity to kind of make the case that Iran to the American public and to the world that Iran is not actually your problem. You're a real problem with these Sunni radicals, you know, in Jihadist and Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia. And so when the U.S. doesn't buy that argument, the U.S. is still very fixated on the idea of Iran as the bad guy. And George Bush and his state of the Union address in January of 2002,

famously lumps Iran in with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and with Kim Jong-il's films for giving North Korea at the time and calls them all an access of evil, which plays very, very badly in Iran. Because at the time Iran is secretly cooperating, actually, with the United States to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, which nobody really knows about. Nobody wants anyone to know about. Not that the Iranians know that the Americans want anyone to know that they're cooperating

secretly in this. So that actually that brings us to the 2000s and '20 teens, which is essentially kind of like a series of mismatched, you know, Iran is ready for dialogue at some point. The U.S. is not then the U.S. is ready. Then Iran is not and you kind of have this back and forth. And then you have this moment of opportunity with the joint comprehensive plan of action. The JCPOA that is reached in 2015 under President Obama. And then from there things kind of go back to let's say a mismatch.

But, you know, we have the election of President Trump who pulls out of the JCPOA in 2018,

and then you have a series of tit-for-tat kind of actions and escalation throughout the first

Trump administration. There's an attempt at diplomacy again in the Biden administration and then we kind of come to President Day. So I guess I've been kind of gone through this whole history. What are I want to ask you to kind of, you know, start to wrap up here by talking to us about what are the screw lines that you see in this very complex history? And you know, we've tried to hit all of the kind of big events, but there's so much more we could have, we could have spent

that entire podcast series talking about some of these events, right? So what are the screw lines here that you see as a historian? Yeah, I mean of course there are some great ruptures which we've already talked about like 1979 especially, it's the biggest one probably. So it's difficult to describe, obviously the history of U.S. Iran relations, you know, of course a 300 years or some sort of, you know, static, you know, sort of generalizable entity.

“But, you know, I think that if we're talking about screw lines, I think it's, you know,”

to me what's always very important is to recognize for the vast majority of the history of these

two countries, they have actually been very, not just friendly, but have had a great deal of mutual admiration, mutual fascination, you know, a really warm, if sometimes idealized idea of each other, and that the last 47 years is actually the anomaly. When you look at it that way, I mean, maybe this is not even overly idealistic and, you know, I recognize that and I started ending in my book in this way. But to me, there is no real reason why the United States and Iran

need to be perpetual enemies. Ronald Reagan, I mean, I used a quote from Ronald Reagan in the epigraph to my book at the very beginning, because in 1986, in the midst of the Iran Contra affair, which we didn't talk about, I know, but, you know, this big scandal, I know, has a big scandal in the Reagan presidency. He comes on television to level with the American people in a live TV address, and he says, you know, the Iranian Revolution is a fact of history,

but between American and Iranian basic national interests, then need to be no permanent concept. Extraordinary thing, especially someone like Reagan, it's kind of this great tough guy, a Republican hero, to say, just five years after the Iranian hostage crisis, when Iran is deeply hated in the United States, much more than it is today, when it is the ultimate embodiment of evil,

there doesn't need to be a permanent conflict between our two countries. That's more than a lot

of democratic presidents have said since Reagan frankly. And I think, and I actually think he was,

“you know, it's actually taught a moving quote, and that's why I wanted to open the book with it,”

because it becomes such a long way from that kind of approach, I think. I think that if someone at a Republican, tough guy, president, five years after the hostage crisis can say that about Iran, surely in both countries today, we could be talking about a very different kind of future. Now, I'm not naive. I know that recent events especially have made that almost impossible. I mean, impossible, let's just say. I mean, I think that if I was giving, when I gave some version of this

conversation, had some version of this conversation, six months ago, a year ago, two years ago,

five years ago, I would always say, you know, it's almost impossible. I'm idealistic, but I'm not

very optimistic. I mean, it's extremely unlikely, you know, where things are pretty bad. Like, it would take something really fundamental to shift, you know, but, you know, never say never. But I don't see it happening. I mean, right now, it absolutely is not going to happen. Unless there is some kind of regime change, successful regime change on the part of the Americans

“in Iran. I mean, that's the only way it can happen. I mean, that's the choice that we have now taken.”

So, in a way, the only positive quote unquote outcome for U.S. Iran relations is, in fact, a successful military operation that, you know, removes the Iranian government, you know, the Islamic Republic in power and stores some kind of pro-American government. Now, do I see that happening? No, I really don't. I mean, the odds of that are actually pretty low. I mean, for all kinds of reasons that I'm sure you and other guests have discussed in recent weeks. But that's where we are.

But again, the through line to me is that this is a wholly unnecessary conflict. And it's a deeply tragic one. And when we look at some of the adversaries that United States has had in the 20th and 21st centuries from Nazi Germany to Vietnam to the Soviet Union, all of them, all of those countries, with the exception of Russia, and even that, it's kind of a asterisk around that. I mean, we had reasonably good relations with Russia actually, up until relatively recently.

But all of those are haxits that we managed to bury. And yet, we cannot, for some reason, get past this enmity. And I don't blame the United States alone for this equate. Both countries are fault for this. But for some reason, we cannot bury the hatchet in either country, you know, with this country that is one of the weakest militarily in the world. And is no real threat to us. And it's unfortunate that we've chosen to

tackle Iran on the way that we have in recent weeks. So, John, I want to, on this note, you know, you started with, you think that 2026 is going to go down as one of the milestone events in the history of the two countries. So, you've started talking a little bit about the present day. Let me ask this final question, which is, if I can ask you to think about what comes next,

“where do you see this going? And what is your historian training?”

You could have made sense of the present moment. I have absolutely no idea. I mean, you know, as a historian, I try to stay away from the present, much less the future, much more comfortable in the past. But look, what I would say is that if we, if we in the United States have any sense, I think that there is an offering that is available. You know, we can declare, I mean, there's nothing original or unique about what I'm about to say,

plenty of other people have said it. We can declare victory. We assassinated the supreme leader of Iran. I mean, no one's ever done that. We assassinated numerous very high ranking.

Iranian leaders from Ali Larajani, to, I mean, you know, revolutionary. I honestly see

commanders. I mean, the current supreme leader hasn't even been seen yet supposedly because he's been so badly injured by the Americanism. I mean, we have made our point. You know, we, if not a bled array, who court on court, at least significantly set back to Iranian nuclear program, you know, I know that it isn't satisfying to kind of step back now and say, well, we know leave the Islamic Republic in place. I know all the problems that go along with that, but the alternative

is a long drawn out war that no one knows the end of. And when I say, we can declare victory and move on, you know, I, I, I said that in full awareness of the fact that that is a highly, highly, highly, undesirable, you know, outcome. It's not, you know, that I recognize all the flaws that that has. Of, you know, leaving the Islamic Republic in place and leaving it, you know, kind of wouldn't back against the wall and a wounded snake, you know, even even more reckless and more likely to

kind of, you know, lash out of the United States and all these things. And, but I do think that that outcome, though it's terrible in a lot of ways, is the least bad outcome because it allows the United States to declare victory. The Iranians can kind of declare some victory. They can sort of say, look, we're still standing. The Israelis can declare the version of victory by saying, you know, we've set back, you know, we've kind of contained Iran even more and so on. You know, I think that

of the Persian Gulf will do their best to try to win back their sense of normality because, of course,

they have a lot of stake in preserving, you know, the kind of narrative that they've built over the past 20 years or so. And so they won't be in a rush to kind of save the Lebanese people, you know,

“or the Palestinians, either any more than they usually are. And so I can, you know, I think that”

there's a real strategy there that is far from perfect, but leaves the Gulf Arab states,

reasonably satisfied, leaves the Islamic Republic feeling like, you know, they kind of got away with,

you know, some things, you know, United States feeling like Trump administration declaring victory and going into the midterms, you know, kind of crowing up with a certain kind of narrative about, you know, what they did to Iran, and it leaves the Israelis reasonably satisfied as well. I don't know why we don't take this. Maybe we are going to take this auction. I don't know. Maybe we just, you know, they're trying to give you all more of a bloody nose before they do.

I don't have no idea. And you probably are way more insight into this, because you, I think, are much more involved in these kinds of sort of think tank discussions than I am. But, I don't know, that's my best guess as an ignorant historian. All right. Well, that's a great place to leave it. Thanks so much, John, for joining. Well, remember, the law fair podcast is produced by the law fair institute.

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