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Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War

Online ISBN:
9780199375721
Print ISBN:
9780199375691
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War

Roham Alvandi
Roham Alvandi

Assistant Professor of International History

London School of Economics and Political Science
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Published:
19 June 2014
Online ISBN:
9780199375721
Print ISBN:
9780199375691
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last shah of Iran, is often remembered as a pliant instrument of American power during the Cold War. In this book Roham Alvandi offers a revisionist account of the shah’s relationship with the United States by examining the partnership that he forged with US president Richard Nixon and his advisor Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. Drawing on American, British, and Iranian sources, this study restores agency to the shah as an autonomous international actor and suggests that Iran evolved from a client to a partner of the United States under the Nixon Doctrine. This book examines the rise of the Nixon-Kissinger-Pahlavi partnership during Nixon’s first term as president, when the United States looked to Iran to fill the vacuum created by the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf in 1971. Then it turns to the peak of the partnership during Nixon’s second term, when the shah succeeded in drawing the United States into his covert war against Iraq in Kurdistan from 1972 to 1975. Finally, the book highlights the decline of the partnership during Gerald Ford’s presidency through a history of the failed negotiations from 1974 to 1976 for an agreement on US nuclear exports to Iran. Taken together, these three historical episodes map the rise and the fall of Iran’s Cold War partnership with the United States in the era of superpower détente, Vietnam, and Watergate.

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