Us Arms Policies Towards The Shah S Iran

This book reconstructs and explains the arms relationship that successive U.S. administrations developed with the Shah of Iran between 1950 and 1979. This relationship has generally been neglected in the extant literature leading to a series of omissions and distortions in the historical record. By detailing how and why Iran transitioned from a primitive military aid recipient in the 1950s to America’s primary military credit customer in the late 1960s and 1970s, this book provides a detailed and original contribution to the understanding of a key Cold War episode in U.S. foreign policy. By drawing on extensive declassified documents from more than 10 archives, the investigation demonstrates not only the importance of the arms relationship but also how it reflected, and contributed to, the wider evolution of U.S.-Iranian relations from a position of Iranian client state dependency to a situation where the U.S. became heavily leveraged to the Shah for protection of the Gulf and beyond – until the policy met its disastrous end in 1979 as an antithetical regime took power in Iran. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Middle East studies, US Foreign Policy and Security studies and for those seeking better foundations for which to gain an understanding of U.S. foreign policy in the final decade of the Cold War, and beyond.

Mark Gasiorowski here examines the cliency relationship that existed between the United States and Iran during the reign of the late shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and assesses the effects of this relationship on Iran's domestic politics. Gasiorowski argues that by bolstering the shah's repressive regime in the 1950s and early 1960s, the U.S.-Iran cliency relationship indirectly helped bring about the Iranian revolution.

Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah offers a detailed account of three key historical episodes in the Nixon-Kissinger-Pahlavi partnership that shaped the global Cold War far beyond Iran's borders. It examines the emergence of Iranian primacy in the Persian Gulf as the Nixon administration looked to the shah to fill the vacuum created by the British withdrawal from the region in 1971. It then turns to the peak of the partnership after Nixon and Kissinger's historic 1972 visit to Iran, when the shah succeeded in drawing the United States into his covert war against Iraq in Kurdistan. Finally, it focuses on the decline of the partnership under Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, through a history of the failed negotiations from 1974 to 1976 for an agreement on U.S. nuclear exports to Iran. Taken together, these episodes map the rise of the fall of Iran's Cold War partnership with the United States during the decade of superpower détente, Vietnam, and Watergate.

The surprising story of Iran's transformation from America's ally in the Middle East into one of its staunchest adversaries "An original interpretation that puts Iranian actors where they belong: at center stage."--Michael Doran, Wall Street Journal "For the clearest view of Iran for the last 100 years, this book is it."--Marvin Zonis, author of Majestic Failure: The Fall of the Shah Offering a new view of one of America's most important, infamously strained, and widely misunderstood relationships of the postwar era, this book tells the history of America and Iran from the time the last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was placed on the throne in 1941 to the 1979 revolution that brought the present Islamist government to power. This revolution was not, as many believe, the popular overthrow of a powerful and ruthless puppet of the United States; rather, it followed decades of corrosion of Iran's political establishment by an autocratic ruler who demanded fealty but lacked the personal strength to make hard decisions and, ultimately, lost the support of every sector of Iranian society. Esteemed Middle East scholar Ray Takeyh provides new interpretations of many key events--including the 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq and the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini--significantly revising our understanding of America and Iran's complex and difficult history.

This is the first full-length account of the CIA's coup d'etat in Iran in 1953—a covert operation whose consequences are still with us today. Written by a noted New York Times journalist, this book is based on documents about the coup (including some lengthy internal CIA reports) that have now been declassified. Stephen Kinzer's compelling narrative is at once a vital piece of history, a cautionary tale, and a real-life espionage thriller.

In 1979, after a decade of enormous increases in the price of oil, U.S. influence in the oil-rich Persian Gulf region declined sharply. Early in the year the Iranian revolution replaced the shah, the principal pro-American leader in the region, with rulers hostile to the United States and to its remaining friends around the Gulf. In December Soviet troops moved into Afghanistan, bringing the Soviets closer to the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. In the United States these events spurred the announcement of the Carter Doctrine and the creation of a new military command to handle Gulf crises. Yet the United States established no new fighting forces, and U.S. friends around the Gulf proved less willing than the shah of Iran to host a U.S. military presence. Thus debate has continued about whether and how the United States can secure important interests in the Gulf region. In this book Thomas L. McNaugher offers a military strategy that integrates U.S. forces into the security framework that already exists in the region. He suggests that the United States should encourage Jordan, Pakistan, Great Britain, and others to continue their historical involvement in Gulf security, especially in such areas as internal security where U.S. forces are no better equipped than theirs and where U.S. participation may undermine the legitimacy of local rulers. In turn, the United States should focus on protecting the oil-rich states of the Arabian peninsula from external attack and on deterring further Soviet encroachment in the region. These missions demand an increase in the agility, rather than the size, of U.S. forces. But the more important requirement, McNaugher argues, is for skillfully blending U.S. military strategy into a diplomacy that exploits, rather than needlessly upsets, regional security mechanisms.