Democracy and the Nature of American Influence in Iran, 1941-1979

Seldom has a book been as timely as this study of American relations with Iran from World War II to the fall of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979. David R. Collier is a highly informed and thoughtful scholar who regrets that as the Cold War heated up, American policy makers sought to guarantee stability and access to Iran's oil often at the price of what he sees as an aborning-democratic culture. That culture flourished most when the young Shah's dependence on the United States for resources created leverage. But it suffered as well because American advisers took a top-down approach to reform and focused on nondemocratic institutions such as the army and, later, SAVAK, the Shah's secret police. Oil revenues in the 1970s for Iran deprived the United States of leverage and freed the Shah to impose his autocratic rule. At the core of Collier's analysis is the concept of leverage and linkages. Leverage has been the instrument of hard power wielded by realists such as Dean Acheson and Henry Kissinger; linkages have been the preferred strategy of idealists such as Patrick Hurley, Loy Henderson, and John Jernegan. The idealists hoped to see Iran become a model democracy in the Middle East. To lump Hurley with the idealists may be a bit of a stretch. Although he promoted the notion of Iran as a test case of the Allies' good intentions, he also interceded on behalf of Harry Sinclair to facilitate his client's interest in an Iranian oil concession. Collier curiously overlooks that point, though he does carefully explore the wartime kerfuffle over Iranian oil

Autocracy · Democracy · Economic history · Economics · Leverage (statistics · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Revenue · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Mathematics

• Reading Iran

  Open Access•Matthew K Shannon•Iranian Studies•2018

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