Rev Left Radio - A History of Iran-U.S. Relations

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

In this episode, Breht speaks with professor of history Dr. Afshin Matin-Asgari to discuss his book Axis of Empire: A History of Iran–US Relations, about the long arc of Iranian–American relations from the nineteenth century to the present. Matin-Asgari argues that U.S. policy toward Iran has been structured by enduring "imperial priorities," a framework that reframes familiar episodes such as the 1953 coup, the consolidation of the Shah (Pahlavi) client state, the revolutionary rupture of 1978–79, the hostage crisis, and the sanctions-and-war paradigm of the twenty-first century . Together, they discuss how state power, oil, militarization, the Israel lobby, imperialist aggression, American arrogance, and transnational political movements shaped this relationship. Finally, they analyze the current war in Iran through the lens of the history discussed. ---------------------------------------------------- Check out our NEW REV LEFT MERCH with Goods For The People HERE Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. All right, on today's episode, I have a treat, truly a treat, but also a timely, topical, hyper-relevant history that I don't think we've ever fully covered here on Rev Left, which is the history of Iran and U.S. relations over the past 100 years. The author I have on is Dr. Afshin-Matin-Azkari, who is a professor of history at Cal state in Los Angeles. He's also Iranian by birth, was born, raised, grew up in Iran, came to the U.S. for university, has gone back at various times, so has not only the academic scholarly expertise on the subject, but also the live reality of it. When he was born and growing up,

he lived under the rule of the U.S.-backed Shah and was even a participant here in the U.S. in the pro-Iran elements on campus of the Iranian Revolution as it took place in Iran. So it's a really interesting perspective that we have. This conversation is fascinating. Critically engage with it. Learn all this history. Apply your own critical thinking to that history. Come up with your own analysis of that history and what it means for today.

But I think somebody that walks out of this conversation will walk out with a much deeper understanding. of this history, as I did from reading the book and from talking to Professor Afshin-Matin-Azgari. So without further ado, here's our discussion on his book, Access of Empire, A History of Iran-U.S. Relations. Enjoy. My name is Afshin Matine Askeri. I'm a professor of Middle East history here in Los Angeles, California, teaching at California State University. Los Angeles. I have written three books focused on a 20th century Iranian political and intellectual history. Iran, of course, is my specialty and my latest book that was published

in January 26 by Verso is titled Axis of Empire, a history of Iran-U.S. Relations. Well, wonderful. It's genuinely a pleasure and an honor to have you on the show. I think for obvious reasons, I think actually I reached out to you before the current war even started because, you know, I thought a history of Iran and U.S. relations would be helpful in general. But then, of course, the war popped off and it made this history even more relevant, even more important for people to understand. Before we get into the book itself, though, if I'm correct reading from your book, it's not really about you as much, but I did get the sense that you actually participated in the Iranian Revolution in 79. Can you talk a little bit about your

sort of biographical connections to Iran? In the book's introduction, I mentioned this briefly. I mentioned my own intellectual formation, and I say that my thinking, my intellectual background, was formed in the 1970s when I was a student here in the U.S. I was born in Iran, finished high school there, then came to the U.S. in 1974, and I joined a very large and effective movement of Iranian student against the Iranian monarchy, against the Shah's dictatorship. and that movement, by the way, became a history of that movement, became the topic of my doctoral dissertation years later.

Those years, as I briefly mentioned in that introduction, I described it as an American new left milieu, anti-imperialist, not necessarily doctrinaire Marxist. There were different strands of the left. And so I was a student here for about three or four years from 1974 to 1978. When the Iranian Revolution broke out, I was studying history. I was a history major about to finish my BA, very much obviously interested in revolutions and an actual revolution.

happened in my country. So I returned in December, 1978, about a month or so before the Shah fell. And I joined, I was not a member of any particular organization. I would participate in street demonstrations. And after the fall of the monarchy, I still stayed in Iran until that. end of the summer of

1979 for about eight months. And so I was there participating in the first post-revolutionary year. I became a journalist. I worked for Tehran's leading

left the newspaper. And I was there for the first six or seven months when Iran was moving from a situation of almost total freedom because the state had collapsed, the Shaw state totally and completely, the armed forces, the bureaucracy, and whatever was left was taken over from

below. Workers were taking over all workplaces, factories, employees are taking over their workplace, ethnic minorities, if you want to call them national minorities, people in Kurdistan had taken over and people were armed because when the Shah's regime fell, the army collapsed and the barracks were opened and hundreds of thousand, hundreds of their figure of like 300,000 small arms were in the hands of ordinary people. So it was an extraordinary condition where power was literally in the streets in the hand of the people. so the task of the new post-revolutionary regime, Islamic Republic, became effectively to set up a new state and take this power back from the people. So when we get to narrating that part of the history, maybe I can talk a little bit more about that juncture. Unfortunately, I returned to the U.S. to finish my studies, but then I did not go back to Iran because of events that we can talk about later.

Sure, yeah. Well, that's a fascinating history, personal history, and personal involvement in the history you're writing about. So not only are you a sort of scholarly expert on this history, but you also, you know, have a real personal relationship to it. So for listeners who haven't read the book, and just by pure statistical reality, most people listening to this will not have thus far, although I urge people to go out and do so. What's the core thesis of access of empire? What do you mean by imperial priorities? And kind of what is the through line you want people to keep in mind about U.S. Iran relations as we work through this history? It's good question. Again, in the book's introduction, I explain that in the past few years of, Several books have been published on U.S.-Iran relations, mostly from international relations, political science perspective, mostly focused on recent decades.

One of them covers long-term history even longer than my book. It's a very good book by John Gazzinian called The U.S. and Iran. And so my book is one among several recent books on U.S. Iran, but none of them, as I try to explain in my introduction, has a decidedly anti-imperialist perspective. I explained that I had reached that perspective 50 years ago when I was a student activist, And everything I learned, all of my academic studies, my teaching, my writing, only made that perspective kind of deeper and stronger. So I wrote the book for Verso and they wanted an anti-imperiodist perspective. And the book is, begins and ends with that. Now, at the same time, it's not that I've chosen an ideological perspective and try to, you know, force my facts.

The book is written from also a scholarly perspective. I use the best kind of primary and secondary sources that I can find. But I think if you look at the evidence, it's clear that the U.S. is behaving as an imperialist power. By the end of the book, and if you look at this war, this doesn't need any proving. Trump's behavior makes it manifestly clear. But I go over the long arc of U.S. Iran history to document and to show, as you mentioned, imperial priorities have guided the history of Iran-U.S. relations on the American side. But with a distinction, the distinction is I go back in the book to almost 200 years ago, 1830s, early 19th century, when the first interactions between Iran and the U.S. began.

but for about a century or so, the states, the U.S. government or the Iranian government were not the main drivers of this relationship. So I think we have to distinguish between a period where individual Americans were going to Iran, and these were mostly Presbyterian missionaries in the beginning. They're going to Iran. They're going to other Middle Eastern countries as they were going to other countries in, in the rest of the world, trying to evangelize. But they were not successful in evangelizing. Their mission was restricted.

They could not preach to Muslims. The Iranian government would not allow them to preach to Muslims. Iran had a very small minority of Christian and Jewish population. They could evangelize to them. but they were not interested in conversion either. So what the missionaries did was to focus on bringing, you know, opening schools, modern education, health clinics, and the Iranians like those kind of services provided. They would go to the countryside.

They would go to remote provinces. Their objective ultimately was to create good sentiment. reception by Iranians and maybe do their evangelical work indirectly. It seems that nobody really cared much for their religious missionary activities, but people they came into contact with, of course, they like, if they live in a remote village in Iran, they like to have a modern school and they like to have a doctor who would help them up. So these early two or three, even four generations of Americans going to Iran in that first century, they create a a measure of goodwill, and so they contributed to a narrative history of relations between the

countries where it began auspiciously. I call it the myth of auspicious beginnings or good intentions. I don't deny that these missionaries created a certain amount of goodwill, but they were not acting on behalf of a government. Their individual, acting in their own private capacity. And then there were a few outstanding Americans who are naming the book, including a school teacher, who was related to this missionary background by the name of Howard Baskerville. Iran had a revolution in early 20th century, more or less coinciding with the Mexican Revolution, with the Young Turk Revolution, with Chinese.

revolution, it was a fight for a constitution to turn the monarchy into a constitutional monarchy. And this one American young American teacher, Howard Basketball, got caught up in his revolutionary sentiment, joined the popular militias, and was shot and killed. So he became a hero. This person who's come from all the way overseas and gave his life for the cause of Iranian freedom. So there are a few individual Americans who contributed to that sense of early positive good relations. But I emphasize that when states enter the picture, that begins in early 20th century, especially after the Second World War. The U.S. is still, you can call them isolationists, they still have too much on their plates.

On the American continent, they are not yet ready to take a global role. So they're probing for business deals. Priorities I mentioned begin and remain on top of the agenda of U.S. Iran relations for the U.S. when governments entered this picture. What the U.S. government was backing in early 20th century was business, interests of U.S. corporations, some kind of access to Iranian markets, but first and foremost, they lobbied for access to oil.

Iran was a major, in some ways, a leading oil exporter throughout the 20th century, it still remains to this day. But Iranian oil was under a concession to a British company and then in which the British government was a major shareholder. The British Empire was running on oil, and Iranian oil was the most important asset that the British controlled. And they had a monopoly. of Iranian world. The U.S. was angling to enter into that market, effectively break the British

monopoly, and it was not strong enough to accomplish that until after, really, the 1953 coup. So these imperial priorities are the imperial priorities of the U.S. anywhere. The so-called open-door economic access, something the U.S. had practiced in Latin America, South America for a long time. And within those priorities, oil was paramount. Yeah, incredibly well said and really gets us up to, I think, a part of the history of U.S. and Iran relations, that a lot of people, specifically those listening to my podcast in particular, will be very familiar. with, which is the 1953 coup against Mozadec. It's often presented as the UK and the U.S. kind of working together to prevent the nationalization of the oil resources by the Iranian people.

So let's just kind of start there. You know, the 1953 coup is the quote unquote known story for many. But in your view, what do common accounts of this era get wrong or leave out? And I also want to add in the emphasis you place on labor and working class struggle in the, the oil nationalization era. And you do this more than many other narratives do, which I really appreciate about this book. And I was hoping you can maybe talk about the central role of the working class struggle in that broader 1953 coup story. The story of the coup is very interesting, very well studied by scholars.

The background, the run-up to it, begins with the significant and significant, of the United States government into Iranian affairs, and that begins during the Second World War. So the U.S. in 1941 joins the occupation of Iran by the Allies, meaning Soviet Union and the British and Soviet forces have already occupied Iran, because the country can be, well, first of all, they want to the British side wants to hold on to their immensely important oil assets. They don't want them to fall into German hands because Germany is advancing deep into Soviet territory and they aim to reach Iran and the Middle East. And so this is the basis of alliance between the Soviet Union and the British Empire

who have been erst what enemies, another allies and economic, geo-strategic interest. Iran is vital in that. And something else is that from the Persian Gulf, there's a railroad, there's an Iranian railroad,

that connects the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea. And so, war material could be sent from the Persian Gulf to the Soviet Union. And the Iranian railroad is crucial. When the U.S. joins in, they begin to bring in massive, massive land lease material to help the Soviets fight the Nazis. So Iran plays a crucial role. It's actually

the Allies called it the Bridge of Victory because of this role. But then you have 30,000 American GIs and related personnel in Iran. And what do the Americans do? They, they They zero in on forging links to the Iranian armed forces. Again, this goes back to the kind of imperial priorities that the U.S. have practiced in the American continent. Now they're going global. And you look at every kind of, actually, every individual country the U.S. has had relations with. linkage to the armed forces is vital. And so they begin to train officers, generals, bring them to the U.S.

And when the war ends, this story is very complex and complicated. My book's first chapter is on 100 years, the first 100 years of U.S.-Iran relations. The second chapter covers only 12 years from 1941. to 1953. And that's the period where the U.S. then deeply enters the picture. When the war ends, there is the first kind of face-off of the Cold War happens, in fact, in Iran, because the Soviet Union drags their feet and they do not evacuate northern Iran. Instead, they support autonomy-seeking governments,

Soviet back two autonomy-seeking governments, one in Iranian-Azabarjan, one in Iranian in Kurdistan. This becomes a huge international issue. The details are too complicated. Eventually, they leave. These governments fall and they're crushed. The second half of the 1940s, then, is the period of a major campaign in Iran to assert national sovereignty through the nationalization of the

country's major asset, the oil that is controlled by a British company. And this is the moment of the emergence of the third world. This is the moment when countries like Egypt, India, former colonies and semi-colonies are getting independence. And Iran is in the forefront of the movement, focusing on oil nationalization. It's eventually accomplished with Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadette, who's prime minister for two years from 1951 to 1953. Mossadette is at the head of a political coalition of nationalist parties or groupies. I hesitate because at that point, all observers agree.

that at that time Iran had only one real organized political party. Its membership was small, but it had links to the labor movement, almost the entire Iranian intelligentsia, everyone who was educated, university students, professors, journalists, translators, writers, all of them were either members or sympathizers of a political party called the Today, which began as sort of an anti-fascist United Front, including communist.

But after the war, it became really a pro-Soviet in color the Stalinist Communist Party. But it was the country's most efficient organized force. The parties that were involved in the nationalist movement were not really parties that could compete with the today. So one issue, the weakness of Mossadegh's nationalist government was it wasn't clear what he wanted to do with the party, with the country's most powerful political movement that was led by communist. Iran had the most powerful Communist Party of the entire Middle East. And so that was part of the difficulty. and as you mentioned, I saw this in the sources, but I tried to bring this to the foreground.

That Mossadev's movement was largely, you can call it a middle-class movement, but there was the demand for oil nationalization as a national demand was first put forward in the 1920s by the first major strivening. of Iranian oil workers in the oil industry. So this was about 20 years before Mossadegh's era. And even when Mossadegh's National Front managed to pass the oil nationalization bill,

that came in the wake of another huge strike by oil workers. So the working class was also involved in it, but it's usually not given the kind of recognition it deserves. Mossadegh's government had a lot of problems in my account, which differs with even, I'm obviously sympathetic to Mossadegh's government, to his effort for nationalization of oil, but I think his movement suffered from several weaknesses, says, I think the most important of them was he relied on the goodwill of the Americans,

who first under Truman and then in his last year, Eisenhower became the U.S. President. It was very clear that from the very beginning, the British were adamantly opposed to the Mossadegh government. They wanted to bring him down. But he was immensely popular. And a direct confrontation with him was not possible. So they had plans for a clandestine operation, buying influence, having agents in the Iranian military. They had a plan worked out for the right moment to seize power and make the Shah. The Shah at that point was a very young man, inexperienced, in some ways, naive,

But the focus was to bolster the Shah, who was pro-Western, pro-British, pro-American. As someone who could stand up to Mossadev, he didn't want to do it. He was very much afraid and hesitant. And Mossadegh, I think, mistakenly thought that the Truman administration was a true friend because Truman posed as an honest broker. He offered to mediate between the Iranians and the British over the issue of oil nationalization. But if you look at the evidence, you can see that even the Truman administration was really on the British side. It observed, for example, a economic boycott that the British had imposed on Iran similar to the boycott that the U.S. imposed on Iran after the revolution.

And Truman observed that boycott. And he was never truly a supporter of the Iranian nationalist cause. I think what the Americans were doing, they didn't mind loosening the British hold on effective monopoly. The British had an Iranian oil. And they were angling for coming in and having a share in that, which is exactly what happened after the 1953 coup. Then American companies got an equal share with British. companies in a consortium that was formed to process and sell Iranian oil. And not to make this long story short, by the time Eisenhower came in, then the cold warriors,

like the Dulles brothers were in charge, the CIA State Department. And they went for picking up the British plan for a military coup. and as the standoff between Mossadeh and the British continued, by the summer of 1953, the Iranian armed forces with leaders, generals, who were deeply connected to the CIA, overthrew Mossadeep, and brought the Shah, the king,

back to Iran who had fled from the scene. The Shah, when the coup, Again, this is the last detail I'm going to and move on. The coup went into implementation in two stages. Stage one was for the Shah, and he was forced to do this. He was afraid, refused to do it until the CIA agent, the man in Tehran, went to the Shah and said, look, we're going to do this with or without you. You remove Mossadev from office or else.

So he did. He issued an order to remove Mossadegh from his post. Mossadegh refused. Then the Shah panicked, got on his plane, and fled the country. He first went to Iraq and then he went to Rome in Italy and sat there waiting for further instructions from the CIA. Three days later, the CIA put the military phase of the coup into operation and got rid of the Mossadegh. they invaded his home and his government was overthrown. He could not defend himself.

I argue in the book that part of the problem was a political force that could have defended him during the coup, but precisely the organized communists. But he never really managed to have a working relationship with them. The communists must also be blamed. they should be, they are not blameless. Because at first they opposed him, Mossadr, finally they came around. The Soviets were not sure how to handle him. So the outcome was Mossadegh's own followers and the communists were paralyzed.

And his coup was successful. And that opened a new chapter in Iranian history and in U.S.-Iran relations. Yeah, amazingly covered, I mean, so much history that you covered there expertly. and this really is the sort of bitter pill that sets the U.S. and Iranian relations in a totally different trajectory from this point forward. I am interested in one little detail, though. You talked about the Communist Party, the Today Party, and you talked about Mosecq as leading a sort of looser coalition of nationalist forces. What were the grounds on which the Today Party was skeptical of or hesitant to join with Mosadd. And what, you know, from Mozadek's perspective or his coalition's perspective, what was the problem with the two-day party?

I'm just kind of interested in the tension there. That's definitely part of the story. Maybe a little goes into too much of like special details. But just simply put the two-day, this is, we have to remember that this is a peak of the Cold War in its early years. they saw Mossadette and especially his good relations with the Truman administration. They saw him as an American stooge. And it took them about a year to come around and change their view and kind of warm up to him. On his part, Mossadegh never trusted them, never really.

I think his mistake was, He was tolerant of the Today Party. He was not the kind of anti-communist leader who would suppress the party, which was technically illegal. But because it was so strong, it was effectively acting in an open daylight. And Mossadegh was okay with that. So to his credit. But if there was going to be a way out of that dilemma, these two forces, should have cooperated

each other. They should have found a way of making a united front. But I think that was difficult and the responsibility is on both sides. Once the two days

began to kind of warm up to Mouad. But then it was also the question of the Soviet Union. And the Soviets were not clear what to make of him. Another thing is Mossandev constantly used the narrative of Iran, the so-called communist threat. He thought that by kind of exaggerating the communist threat, that would make the Americans

support him. So it was effectively using the Today as a as a boogeyman to scare the Americans. But I think his mistake was that was precisely our sources so that show that both British intelligence and the CIA knew that the Today Party was quite strong, but it was not strong enough to take over in Iran, nor did it have any plans to take over. But this idea that Iran was on the verge of falling to the Reds, which Mossadegh sometimes also used, I think it worked to his detriment. And so these two forces that it was not easy to find common grounds. But if they had been able to unite, for example, in 1953, they could have stopped the military coup. but they didn't.

They never managed to establish a working relationship. They didn't have to officially form a government together, although the Tudad briefly was part of an Iranian government, even at the cabinet level, before Mosaedep. But some kind of unofficial pact between them could have changed things, but unfortunately it didn't happen. Wow. Absolutely fascinating. That's a part of that history that I personally did not know about. So you really filled that out in my own mind and just a fascinating and tragic part of history because, as you say, there's a real possibility of a different trajectory had they set aside their skepticism of one another and teamed up. But anyways, the coup, as we all know, historically was successful. Mosadec was overthrown. The Shah was implemented. And in chapter three, you cover the the 50s and the 60s where they're attempting to build Iran into a Cold War client state.

And you also talk about in that process, in that chapter, the Shah's 1963 white revolution. I'm wondering if you could kind of take us through the main points of that chapter and that process. Thank you for having read the book so carefully and pulling out all of these kind of major, you know, events and turning points in it. Yes, after the coup, for one thing, the Shah, the king who was brought back and put on his throne, people knew that. It was not a secret. So the Shah suffered from a tremendous lack of legitimacy. People knew that he was there because of foreign power.

The British were involved in the coup, but because Mossadegh had cut off relations with them, they were acting behind the scene. The boots on the ground or the operations were done by CIA and their agents. In fact, they used a network of British spies that now worked for the CIA. So both British and American influence came back, but now the U.S. was the hegemon in Iran. The British Empire was on its kind of declining phase, like everywhere else. the Americans were taking their place, and so they began to build up a client state.

This is a title of one of the good books on the history of that period. And by client state, we imply a relationship where the Shah's regime, oftentimes later on, even by its, you know, the student opposition, sometimes the slogans where the Shah is a puppet of the U.S. A puppet is a simplification.

I mean, it wasn't like the Shah every morning picked up the phone and said, ask what to do, even though at some points in his reign, and especially when he was about to fall, that's exactly what he was doing. He was asking the Americans what he should do.

But one point I emphasize in this book is the Shah's relations with the U.S. also had his ups and downs and it evolved In the beginning of the 1950s, he was weak and vacillating. And during that time, what the U.S. did is a strengthened ties with Iran's armed forces, and it helped the Shah establish a very dreaded secret police called Savok.

And Savok was established with American and Israeli experts, working closely with Iranians, and became a very efficient secret police organization, intelligence organization. Later on, its role in operations, including crushing all dissent. In the 1970s, Iran had an armed opposition,

a guerrilla movement, both Islamic and Marxists. And the Savag, was in charge of wiping that out. And this is the period when the Sovok became very much involved in torturing people and generally creating an atmosphere of fear and dread. And it has spies everywhere. And even when it didn't have spies,

it deliberately amplified his presence to create an atmosphere of terror and dread. That's the atmosphere I grew up in Iran as a child. and then as a high school student, I experienced that personally. But by the 1960s, again, this is a long history, and I tried to condense it into a few sentences. By the 1960s, early 60s, when Kennedy was U.S. president,

he had ideas for some kind of a realignment of U.S. foreign policy. Kennedy was smart. He realized that just mere repression is not going to always work. It's better to kind of... He never shied away from, you know, coups, and they overthrew the Vietnamese government.

He intervened in Cuba. So it's not that he was just this peaceful person who adopted different policies. But he was smart enough to combine the hard strategy of imperialism with measures of reform. One of the major things that also carried out in Latin America was for the U.S. to support land reform. Because the thinking at that time was major revolutionary upheaval, such as the Chinese revolution, revolutions that were taking place in Latin America.

They were about land. So land reform was on the agenda. And the idea behind this was land reform, in fact, it breaks up. The old kind of agrarian structure, the old ruling classes, should somehow move towards a more market-oriented capitalist economy. Just the assets of the country is being frozen in land is not the way to go. So this idea was part of a global transition to capitalist relations. The Kennedy administration was interested in that. And so by 1963, very much pushed by the U.S., the Shah carried out what some observers have called a revolution from above.

This is, they called the white revolution to distinguish it from a red revolution. And the ironic thing was the most important points of this white revolution. The major point was land reform. But land reform had been on the top priority agenda of Iran's left forces, the Tudor Party and smaller splinter factions of the Iranian left. As I discussed in my chapters in 1960s and 70s, after the 1953 coup, the Tudor Party was basically crushed and eliminated and its survivors fled the country. They resided in Eastern Europe. But Iran had other left tendencies. Many of them had split away from the Today Party.

Some were social democratic. Some were socialist anti-communist. Some were independent Marxists. So there was a leftist presence, and all of them had land reform on top of their agenda. So the Shah's rhetoric behind his white revolution was fine. Why should the left carry this out? I will carry it out. I'm a revolutionary monarch, and he even borrowed the vocabulary of the left. This is a revolution for Iran's workers and peasants. He promised profit sharing to the workers.

He part of the white revolution was Iranian women could have the franchise. They could have voting rights, which was, again, on top of proposals by the Iranian. left. Another one was a literacy campaign. Some of these things were carried out in Latin America, but again, a literacy campaign was proposed by Iranian students leftist circles in Europe. Now, the White Revolution was a turning point in the 1960s because it was real. It was not just a pretense. And it came at a time where opposition in Iran was being revived after the coup, all opposition and all independent political activity was crushed. But by the 1960s, it made a comeback. And this time, the core and center of activism was in Iranian universities.

The student population, left-leaning students were in the forefront of the opposition in Iran and pretty much everywhere in the world. This is the story of the 1960s, 1970s. And this was the kind of new left that I alluded to at the beginning of our conversation. Some were pro-Soviet. Others were different kind of leftists. Later on, some of them became Maoist,

independent leftist. So the left was vibrant and active, but his social base was mostly in the student movement. And a fact about the student movement was, in the 1960s, Iran did not have enough capacity in its own universities to absorb all the high school graduates. So we had this strange situation

where half of Iran's student population in the 1960s studied outside of Iran. And that's where the anti-Shah operations, opposition movement gained ground because outside of Iran, then Savok or the security forces had no access to stop the students from activism. If they went back to Iran, yes, they would be persecuted, prosecuted for their activities. But when outside of Iran, they could be active. And so the national front, the forces that are aligned with Mossad, they have also made a comeback during the 1960s.

So there was a vibrant opposition. And for the first time, a religious opposition led by Atulah Khomeini, who became a famous name with the revolution. That also emerged. So it was a composite or a hybrid opposition that the Shah was facing. And when he carried out the white revolution, the opposition was in. a difficult place because the Shah himself was carrying out some of their proposals. I think the opposition had it correct because their main slogan, this is a slogan they posted

at the head at the main gate of Tehran University. Their slogan was reform, yes, dictatorship, no. So the idea was fine. If you want to carry out these reforms, fine and good. But we reject the Shah's personal dictatorship. Iran had a constitution going back to the early 20th century constitutional revolution, where the Shah shared power with an elected parliament, a magelless. And so the Shah was not a mere ceremonial office,

but he had to share power with a at least semi-democratic parliamentary system. The problem was the Shah would not observe that. In name, Iran was a constitutional monarchy. In practice, it was increasingly a one-man show. And I think, again, one of those turning points is, I think the Shah at that moment, he had a choice. He might have, his regimes were being implemented, they were to some extent successful.

If he had opted to be a constitutional monarch, he might have ironically kind of strengthened his rule if he had allowed some kind of political participation. But he chose, and I emphasize here, that this was his choice. It wasn't that the Americans told him, no, you have to rule with an iron hand. This was his choice, and I would say,

his major strategic mistake. Instead of agreeing at least a degree of real power sharing, he didn't have to go and make Iran the most democratic country in the world. But if he had allowed a degree of real political participation, the revolution that came down the line may not have happened. And I would argue in the books chapter four that even a year before he was overthrown. If he had made a real political compromise, things could have been different. The problem was the Shah was carried away

with this idea of being in total control during the 1960s, successive U.S. administration, Johnson followed Kennedy, and then came Nixon, who, during Nixon, the Nixon-Kissinger years, were the peak of a special relation with the Shah.

By that time, Iran's oil income was exponentially increasing. The Shah was personally in charge of all those billions of dollars. He had built up his armed forces to the point that he would militarily intervene in the affairs of Iran's neighbors. He supported the Kurdish uprising in Iraq against the Ba'i regime of Iraq that was pro-Soviet. He intervened in the country of Iran. and put down a leftist insurrection. Gradually, he was kind of having delusions of grandeur about his own mission and power.

And Nixon and Kissinger would bolster this sense because they found, in Shaw, a very reliable ally. For one thing, he was recycling billions of dollars of oil income into buying anything, the most advanced armaments that the U.S. could provide. Kessinger basically put in there the directive that D'Shea could buy anything and everything, all kinds of armed short of nuclear weapons from the U.S.

And this was amazing. So the kind of deals that were made between Iran, Iran and the U.S. at that time, they were astronomical, very lucrative for the American side, not only from an economic point of view, but because the military machine that had built up under the Shah was a counter-revolutionary force that could be used. I know that you mentioned. I know this would make the conversation even longer. In the 1960s, Iran also became effectively a laboratory for the implementation of modernization theory, that people going back to the Kennedy administration,

Walt Rostow, then later on Samuel Huntington, these people were gurus of this kind of thinking. And the idea was countries around the world should become modern by basically following an American blueprint tied to the U.S., the kind of transformations that the Shah White Revolution had introduced, with a component of it being power had to be concentrated in some kind of political order from above.

And people like Sammy Huntington and Ross Star himself personally, when specifically endorsed the Shah. And their idea was, yes, this is the right way to go. countries can and should modernize the American way, but it can be maybe better accomplished by a dictatorial regime. The assumption there was that the alternative would be losing in competition to communist rivals, either through insurgencies or popular regimes, you know, like one important case. when Marxist regime came to power was Chile during Al-Iende, and he too was overthrown 20 years after Mossadev through a CIA-a-ling coup. And so those were the years of implementation of modernization theory

and also the rise of American soft power. American culture, Iranian educational system was geared from French to American. obviously Iranian students like myself were coming to the U.S. for their education. By the 1970s, there were 50,000 Iranian university students in the U.S. It was the largest cohort of any students from any foreign country. And at the same time, there are 50,000 Americans living and working in Iran. Most of them tied to military projects, not all of them. The others mostly tied to kind of different kind of U.S. corporations, you know, from Pepsi Cola to Colonel Sanders, Kentucky Fried Chicken, you name it.

We had it in Iran, and American films, American television, I grew up watching them dubbed on Iranian TV. So there was this kind of cultural Americanization, which also created a backlash, this sense of something, a cultural shift that worked to the advantage of also the Islamist opposition in Iran. That what is happening in our country? We're selling our resources to the Americans, and we're selling our culture, authenticity. We're losing ourselves. So all these things were the entanglement of that transition period. So now we're moving towards the coming of the revolution. I don't know how fast our pace is, but maybe I know you had some questions about the revolution.

So maybe you could go there now. Yeah, let's go ahead and move in the direction of the revolution. Of course, an interview is only going to be able to capture some, you know, the highlights of these periods of time. I think you did a wonderful job kind of talking about the core contradictions in that period between the coup of 1950, leading up to the revolution you have the Shah, who is implementing on behest of certain modernization theories coming from the U.S., implementing certain reforms, but doing it in a very top-down dictatorial way, not allowing any political power sharing, not allowing even a constitutional monarchy, let alone the creation of an actual democracy.

You have U.S. culture sort of permeating Iran and giving Iranians the sense that they are selling themselves out literally in the form of their resources to the U.S., but also culturally, to the values and the sort of spectacle of U.S. culture. And so you have these contradictions bubbling up. You have the Shah increasingly succumbing to delusions of grandeur, which Nixon and Kissinger, as you said, took advantage of. You have this militarized army that is going around the region and intervening in Iraq's Ba'ath regime and putting down, as you said, that leftist revolutionary movement in Oman.

So you have these contradictions really bubbling up, and that kind of paves the road, as you will, as you will, to the famous revolution in 1979. So we're kind of understanding how the revolution was boiling under the surface, and then it erupts. And we know the factions involve from everything from nationalist to student radicals to Marxists, of various sorts. So let's go ahead and talk about the revolution directly. Kind of, you know, how did it pop off, right? How did it actually erupt onto the stage? And what were the main social forces in the Iranian Revolution?

You summarize things, by the way, excellently. Thank you. But now to jump into the revolution, again, to do a fast forward, one simple way of putting it is the revolution happened as revolutions often do. that the Ancian regime, the Shah's regime, had a crisis. The crisis gradually developed more acute in the second half of the 1970s. And the crisis consisted of Iran's modernization in some ways was getting out of control, their bottlenecks, their difficulties, and there was intense and growing opposition.

There were underground. the numbers were small, but they were galvanizing and radicalizing, mostly the student opposition. The Shah also have some problems with the U.S., some kind of tension in the post-Nixon era. There was some kind of a moment of pause after Ford, when Carter became president, this is in the post-Fietnam, post-Watergate, some kind of thinking in the U.S., in Congress, at least in the media, what are we doing?

Why are we supporting these detritorial regimes? What happened in Vietnam? What about Iran? Is it wise to have a one-man rule in charge of such a vast and complicated kind of conglomerate? There is a misconception that Carter helped bring down the Shah, and he never did that. Or if you want, he did by ignoring this crime. crisis brewing more intensely. In the one year before the outbreak of the revolution, it happened at the end of 1978. But in 1977, 1978, it appears that U.S. officials, diplomat, a few experts were sounding

warnings that things are not going well in Iran. But nobody seemed to pay any attention to them. and by the end of summer of 1978, maybe like four or five months before the Shah fell, then the U.S. ambassador in Tehran came back from a summer vacation in the U.S. and realized that, oh, my God, things are not good, and he began sending messages that the Shah may not even survive. So the current administration had only a few months to adjust to a situation where The Shah was in peril. By the time they got their act together, it was too late.

The whole country, this is important in the Iranian Revolution, and it's important also for understanding the present moment. In the present moment, there's a sense promoted and pushed by Israel and the Trump administration that what is required for regime change is people going into the streets and perhaps dying some of them, and then the regime would fall because they think this is a replay of the Iranian revolution. And this is not correct.

The revolution was successful. The most important thing was the country went on a general strike. Oil workers were not strike. Government employees went on a strike. Private sector was in a strike. Pretty much by early January 1978, the whole country had shut down. And of course, there were street demonstrations too, but the more important thing was the strike.

And by that time, the Shah had put in place a military government. And after some kind of intense negotiations, he accepted to go on a vacation. He left Iran. And so the country, very briefly, was strangely an American general, Heiser from NATO command was sent to Tehran to act as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces to make sure the Iranian armed forces would not collapse. So in the case of whatever regime came to power after the Shah, the army could remain intact, an army, an armed force tied to the U.S.

and go straight into the post-revolutionary region. And we have interesting evidence. Again, I can go into detail. But Heuser was asking the Shost generals that what is your plan? Do you think you can bring the country to order? Can you end the strikes? And they said, no, we can go out in there and kill thousands of people. But we can't force people to go back to work.

So he eventually told them fun. So you've lost. And they agreed to Khomeini coming to back to. Iran from his exile in Paris. First he was in Iraq, then he went to France. And when he came back, it was all over. At some point, these are the events that I myself witnessed and participated in. It was the Shah's regime had politically collapsed, but the army was still there. But it was collapsing also from inside. So within two days in February, in 1917, people began attacking barracks and military outposts and the army collapsed.

So the old regime was gone. And now we had something that historians have called the spring of freedom. There was no state. It's a very strange kind of thing to imagine. I experienced it in my lifetime, living kind of six months with no state hovering over your head. there was total and absolute press freedom, you know, as I explained in the beginning, factories were in the hands of the workers, any workplace, the employees were in charge. The big part of the ruling class had either fled the country, leaving all of their,

everything they owned behind, or they had pulled back and were hoping to take it back from their workers and employees. So it was not clear what would happen. Atulah Khomeini had proposed an Islamic Republic. And in fact, soon after he came back, they put that idea to a referendum and basically simply asked the question, do you support that the monarchy be replaced by an Islamic Republic. And the people overwhelmingly answered yes. The problem was Islamic Republic had no definition. I mean, there was an Islamic Republic next door in Pakistan, but it was a military dictatorship. So what Iran's Islamic Republic would be was absolutely unclear. I don't think there was a conspiracy. I don't think Hohmani himself even had an idea. Some of his supporters put a

draft of a constitution in front of him, which was ironically like the old Iranian constitutional monarchy, except the monarch was replaced by kind of a presidential system. And at first, he said, okay, well, let's just put this to a referendum and we go with it. But that's not what happened, because clearly it was a sense that Khomeini and supporters would lose control. So in the first six post-revolutionary month, and very intense struggle began to take shape to build a post-revolutionary state where power was very tightly in the hands of Khomeini and a political party that was quickly organized to support this idea of what I would call

a constitutional dictatorship, which is the basis of the Islamic Republic. of Iran, a supreme leader, obviously Khomeini himself, had absolute power and control over all branches of government. And Iran became a republic, but the republican structure had a clerical stratum superimposed on it that at any level clerics could have veto power over the Republican institutions. So in some ways you could say it was a theocracy. And on top of everything was the supreme leader for many himself. And so the political struggles of that first year became an intense pushback by many, many different sectors of Iranian. The Revolutional Coalition fell apart. Everybody was in it. Marxists of different stripes,

cross-Soviet Marxist, anti-Soviet Marxist, different kind of religious, radical Islamic groups. We had a certain kind of political species that was called Islamic Marxist, which seems like a contradiction in terms. But in fact, there were people who were simultaneously radical leftist, perhaps in some ways, Marxist, and truly and honestly Muslim. We had that too. And these, none of these factions were for the kind of government that Khomeini proposed. Parts of the country were in the hands of armed insurgents, such as, for example, in Kurdistan, and they held their ground because there was no central army to go there and suppress them. The army had to be rebuilt from the ground, and the way it was rebuilt was the Revolutionary Guards. The Revolutionary Guards were the kind of the first as a citizen's militia, and gradually they became a formidable military force during especially the Iran-Iraq War that started in 1980.

And by the summer of 1979, things came to a head. even some religious leaders, great Aetolos, were opposed to the idea of a constitutional dictatorship. I think early on people were mistakenly seeing what happened in Iran as a form of a fanatical Shiiteocracy. This idea, the idea that clerics rule a country, was totally and absolutely alien to, the political tradition of Islam or Shiasa.

It was a total innovation. It was a political project. And to move things to, I know, we don't have much time. I think a very important turning point was what happened in November 1979. It was the end of the revolution's first year, what Homania himself called a second revolution. Can I pause you right there? Yes.

Just very quickly, I want to get back to the Second Revolution, the hostage crisis, all of that, but I just want to follow up a little bit on what has been said already. Just pointing out, you know, the general strike as this primary weapon during the revolution, the surreal nature of a period of statelessness, which you articulated, you know, fascinatingly well. This situation that happens in, I mean, almost every post-revolutionary situation that I can think of from France to Russia and beyond is this. power vacuum that opens up after a successful revolution. I mean, even in the German revolution, sort of a power vacuum opens up after a successful revolution. And then there's these factions that are, you know, sort of jostling with one another to consolidate power. So that's a,

that's a real feature of revolutions more broadly. But I'm just curious on one point. Ayatollah, the clerics, you know, they kind of, they consolidate their power and advance this Islamic, this constitutional Islamic Republic with this clerical strata. that can kind of veto anything that comes up from the parliamentary, you know, machinations of the new republic. But certainly there, I'm just curious about the popular support for Ayatollah Khomeini and the rule of the cleric. Certainly there had to be something there.

The formation of the IRGC lends itself to the idea that there was some popular support for that faction, despite all the other factions that had deep issues with it. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that before we move into the hostage crisis. You're absolutely right and that's part of the complexity of paradox of the Islamic Republic, something that as you rightly pointed out, that Khomeini personally was immensely popular. You can call him a charismatic leader, but his popularity was phenomenal. And so that was used to build a movement, effectively a state, primarily against the popularity of this man. That led some on the left. The Iranian left was split in the middle. The pro-Soviet left

supported the idea of an Islamic Republic in the hopes that Khomeini, in the face-off between the Soviets and the U.S., we remember that the Cold War, this superpower rivalry was still going on, and Iran is a neighbor of the Soviet Union. So the idea for Soviet communist was that the Islamic Republic would at least tilt to the Soviet side. So they supported uncritically, basically, everything Khomeini was doing. The other half of the Iranian left was vehemently opposed to it, and some of them argued that the Khomeini phenomena is a form of fascism. It borrows ideas from the left and the right, is focused on a charismatic leader,

and it has real and significant mass popular following. Now, we can kind of debate to what extent that was true, but there's no question that the Islamic Republic was not, you know, something that was just simply imposed with force and violence by a minority, it did have significant at perhaps majority support. But the question is, this support was shifting. In spring, 1979, when they carried out the referendum, according to official statistics, it passed with 99% of approval. Even if that's an exaggeration, it was clear that it had overwhelming support. Something that was a blank check,

written by Khomeini, telling the people of Iran, we're going to trust me, we're going to fill this out. By a year later, less than a year later, when the Constitution of the Islamic Republic, with the structure that we just mentioned, was approved, the approval rating was 75%. So within less than a year, the popularity had diminished by a significant 25%.

I'm not saying that it would have eventually collapsed to nothing. But definitely the direction of the change was the other side. The left was strong. There were religious dissidents, powerful Aitulahs, who were opposed to the new regime. The Khomeini faction was still in the saddle, but they're not secure. Yeah. So this is the point where we get to the second revolution if you want us to make that transition now. Yeah. Well, let's go ahead and I know that you have a certain time limit on your end. So let's go into the hostage crisis and the second revolution. I think that's a crucial part of it. And then we can kind of move into the post-9-11 era and get us up to the contemporary situation if that's okay with you. We're going to have to skip the war with Iraq and Iran-Contra. But hopefully maybe we can have you back to discuss that period of history.

as well at some point. So I'm going to do a fast forward that the hostage crisis again is one of those very complicated episodes of U.S. Iran. It's the beginning of the confrontation between U.S. and Iran that has been going on for almost half a century for 47 years. And it, of course, was Khomeini's student followers took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. It began as a sitting. It began as these students going in there and pre-empting moves by leftists who they thought would want to occupy the embassy, as the left had done one time previously. Right when the

Shah fell, leftist faction, took over the U.S. embassy for a day, and the Islamic Republic forces went in there and rescued the U.S. ambassador, evicted the leftists. So it was a fear that the left might do this again. So perhaps in the preemptive move, Khomeini's followers took over the embassy. And even though Khomeini at first hesitated, he wasn't sure what to do, I think he quickly realized that this could be a rallying board

to kind of sort the flag of anti-imperialism. Of course, the revolution had a very powerful anti-imperialist charge. The lefts especially clamored for cutting all types of, with the U.S. The ties existed. The provisional government had still ties with the U.S. It was a demand of the anti-imperilist left that why are we still having relations with the U.S. So effectively relations were caught. And my argument in the book is, I'm not the first one who's doing this, but I emphasize this, that the hostage crisis, more than taking the Shah back or his wealth, the Shah was dying and he died during the hospital.

hostage crisis and his wealth was never back. But it was a move that allowed Hormani to consolidate power and silence any and all opposition. If you are an existential standoff with the most powerful kind of hegemon of the globe, nobody, you wouldn't let anybody to oppose you. And it was during the hostage crisis also that Iran was internationally isolated. that Iraq invaded Iran and there were eight years of very destructive war. I'm not going to get into that.

But the period of the war is also important in the character and makeup of the Islamic Republic as a militarized regime. Those eight years of war are the years when, for example, the Revolutionary Guard was built into a... Iran has a regular army,

conscripts, professional officers, and generals, but also as a parallel army that is the Revolutionary Guards much more powerful, and again, to move faster forward to the present, when the war was over, and it wasn't over with an Iranian success, it drained the country tremendously. Iran paid a massive cost for the war, which might be relevant to the war that's going on now. We can talk about that later. When the war was over, soon after Da'Atollah Khomeini died, and in the 1990s, you can think of a period of post-war reconstruction.

In that period, there were moves by the Islamic government to perhaps reach out and, if not normalize, at least reach some kind of a detent with the U.S., which were, in fact, successful by the time of the time of, Clinton's second administration, relations with the Islamic Republic were not normal. The U.S. never lifted the economic sanctions that Carter began when the hostages were taken. So the sanctions regime that has been put on Iran for almost 50 years began with the hostage crisis. It was the price that Iran paid for this defiance, and Iran could never get out of this sanction trap. The sanction, of course, became intensified. We're moving into the post-9-11 period.

When Israel especially intensely lobbied from the 1990s, from the first period of Netanyahu being in office, the argument was if the U.S. wants to militarily intervene in the region, what it should do, this was the program of the neocons, especially in the lead up to 9-11 and afterwards. The country it should invade and the regime it should change is not Iraq. This was the argument before the Iraq War. It is Iran. And why is this the case? I think my bottom line argument is Israel needed to fabricate an existential threat. It had no opposition. It had defeated all of its Arab country adversaries, reached some kind of accommodation with them. It was in control of the Palestinians, but it needed to justify itself by having a foreign threat.

And I think the Islamic Republic, this is one of the criticism I have of them, is that they obliged, but also kind of focusing on Israel as a nemesis in alliance with the U.S. The Israeli argument, especially after 9-11, was that Iran is building a nuclear bomb. It has a nuclear enrichment program, which he says is for peaceful purposes, but they're secretly trying to build a bomb. And this wasn't true. yes, Iranians had probed kind of scientifically, technologically, towards bomb-building capability,

but you need a certain level of uranium enrichment to be able to actually do that. The other Israeli argument was Iran is a threat because it has military presence around Israel. And this again was to some extent true because Iran was helping the Hezbollah in Lebanon defend itself against Israeli aggression. Iran had links to Palestinian resistance movements like Hamas, Islamic Jihad.

And then later on, Iran began to militarily intervene in Syria with support of Bashar Assad's government. When the Iraqi regime fell, then Iran established close ties with the Iraqi government, which was an ironic outcome of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But this idea that Iran is building a bomb and any minute became like a permanent fixture of this conversation, this is the idea that Trump is constantly harping on.

Even he cited that for the failure of negotiations during the ceasefire. But again, to get fast forward to, the current war, during Obama's second term, there was a breakthrough that for the first time, a US president or a US administration decided to negotiate with the Islamic Republic. And Obama faced intense pressure by the Israeli lobby.

Netanyahu came here and snobbed, the US president, went against him to US Congress. But lo and behold, the Israel's, lobby failed. And an agreement was reached between Iran and the U.S. where Iran would keep its uranium enrichment strictly within the limits that no bomb making was possible, would be monitored internationally. And Obama began to lift some of the sanctions, not entirely. So it was like a step-by-step process. And it was working. Then comes Trump during his first term. And it's just through that agreement out the window and said, this is not good enough, I'm going to get a better

deal. Well, the better deal never materialized. The better deal is the war we have right now. So I'm not saying that the Islamic Republic is entirely blameless in this horrible condition we're facing. One of their mistakes was they stayed within the Obama deal for a time. They kept their enrichment to that minimum level. Then they began enriching and they enriched to 60%. And the stated official policy of the Islamic Republic was building a nuclear bomb is even against Islam and will never build a bomb. So why would you increase your enrichment towards bomb building, which you know is an excuse your enemies will use against you. Some people have said they wanted to have a leverage. They wanted to hold the threat of that capability as a bargaining ship. I think they made a mistake.

Think if they should have stayed within, if you don't want to build a bomb, then don't kind of go the route of bomb building. If you want to build a bomb, then go ahead and quietly build one. I'm not an advocate of that. But I think this policy of nuclear ambiguity did not work for the Iranian side, but obviously the responsibility for this war and for keeping those honorous sanctions on Iran, which were meant to hurt the people of Iran. Sanctions of that enormity are an act of war. And they are designed to hurt the people. They did not really hurt the Revolutionary Guards, In this process of the past 10, 20 years, the Revolutionary Guards became a formidable economic force. They became sort of a military industrial economic complex.

They control the lion's share of Iran's economy. They, in fact, run a black market, money laundering, financial dealings to circumvent the sanctions. So the sanctions never weakened the regime. In some ways, it made it politically stronger, more repressive. But they heard ordinary Iranians for 50 years. The rationale was for the people to rise up against the regime. Now, the Iranian people have had all kinds of gripes and grievances against the Islamic Republic. They have risen against them in cycles of protests.

1999, 2001, the late, you know, in the run-up to the Women's Life Freedom Movement in 20, 23, 23, 4, last January. And these movements have been asking for peaceful change opening up with the system. They haven't been asking for the regime's overthrow, and they have been systematically repressed and violently. So the pressure for change from Iranian civil society is there. And to some extent, sometimes they've been successful. For example, mandatory hijab was removed after the women's life freedom movement. So now Iranian women are pretty much free to dress as they want. But the responsibility for bringing us to this moment,

obviously the responsibility is on the American side. Partly, I would blame the Biden administration, which after Trump won a presidency, had a chance to reach some kind of accommodation with Iran, but it didn't. It just continued the sanctions and was just fully in support of Israel's genocidal acts in Gaza towards the Palestinians.

So that was a chance that was missed. And we got to the Israeli invasion of Iran, Israel after, and I'm going to wrap this up now, almost to the end of our hour and a half. So as Israel was carrying out its genocidal kind of, it wasn't a war against, because a war you need another state or some kind of equivalent military force.

Hamas was. was not, you know, an entity that could wage war against Israel. It was an act of genocide, fully supported in every sense, militarily American weapons, American diplomatic support. While Israel was engaged in that, it also began striking deeper and deeper against Iran. Clearly, with the intention of escalating this to a war with Iran, it began killing Iranian scientists. It began kind of attacking Iranian kind of presence elsewhere outside of its borders.

It prevailed upon Trump to kill American personnel who were even actually sometimes cooperating with the U.S. And at some point, it hit an Iranian diplomatic presence in Syria. And then the Islamic Republic then finally retaliated by hitting Israel militarily. And it led up to tit for tat. And in the summer of 2025, last summer, Israel invaded Iran. And Trump joined in by a member. massive bombing campaign, claiming, now ironically, in the light of what's happening now, Trump claimed that he had obliterated, as he always does, Iran's entire kind of nuclear

infrastructure. So if he had already demolished it, then why the argument now that this war is to prevent Iran to develop a nuclear bomb if you have already destroyed all of their capabilities. So that was last year and this war is in a sense a continuation of that unfinished business. Yeah, incredibly well said. Let me offer some arguments to you. I know I'm going to be respectful of your time and just get your thoughts on some of these things on the things that you touched on going in that last period of history that you were discussing. Obviously, your book is about the U.S. and Iran relations, but you talk heavily about the Israel in the war with Iraq, for example, the U.S. sort of is trying to prolong the war and expands a sanctions regime.

And then the Israeli lobby in the United States becomes a really crucial factor against rolling back those regimes. They really become connected to the neo-conservative movement under Bush post-9-11 and trying to get more aggression towards Iran. Netanyahu, since the 1990s at least, has been saying that Iran is a weak. away, a month away, three days away, two hours away from getting a nuclear bomb. And as Trump starts the war in the last month or so, literally came out and said, this is a dream come true for me, 40 years of a dream come true. And of course, there are media clips of him over the last 40 years, clearly trying to push American administrations into this war. Somebody has come out of the Trump administration. I forget the exact person. But they've basically,

argued that Netanyahu, or perhaps it was the Biden administration, but either way, the argument was from inside the Biden administration that Netanyahu has tried to get president after president since at least Clinton to go to explicit war with Iran, and Trump was the first one to actually do it. With regards to, so I mean, that's not to, that's not to deviate at all from what your argument is. I think that fits quite nicely with it. To your point about the 60% enrichment, my understanding and correct me if I'm wrong, was that as the JCPOA, which basically solved this entire nuclear problem, had international third party oversight, et cetera, as that was falling apart under Trump, the enrichment to 60 percent, despite the fatwa against nuclear

weapons, was basically a way of Iran showing that you're trying to go back on this agreement that we've already made. We're showing you that we can escalate if need be, but it was all in the context of that initial agreement being slowly rolled back rhetorically and then in practice through the Trump administration. And so that enrichment attempt was really an attempt to say, we can do this. We're not doing this, but we can do it as the U.S. and Israel, of course, and their influence is trying to roll back and already agreed upon agreement, the JCPOA. So from that sense, from that perspective, that would make some sense to most people, I think, that Iran is trying to not escalate unnecessarily, but simply advance their ability to do so,

if need be. What do you say to that? No, you're well put. I totally agree with seeing that argument. I think I differ, and that's a logical argument that many people, not necessarily those on the left or people who support the Islamic Republic might present. It may be like the logical. called tit for that outcome. Many people have said this enrichment to 60% was sort of a deterrent showing that we can do this if we wanted to, but let's negotiate so we would step back from it and we wouldn't get there. I think that I don't think that was a smart move. I think the nuclear even program, I'm personally against nuclear energy also. I think that, I think that's a nuclear energy also. I I think it's wasteful. I think it's dangerous. And it's been extremely expensive. And at the end of the

day, just before the war, Iran was facing electrical shortages. So the nuclear program has been enormously costly, economically, politically dangerous because of this angle. I think the war also shows something else. It shows that no matter who is in charge, in Iran. The best defense they have is what they're primarily doing now. Iran has a chokehold on where 20% of the war's oil passes, the Strait of Formos. And to make a mess of it, if someone invades them and wants to overthrow them or makes life difficult for them, they could say, okay, you're doing this to us, you're destroying our country, but we're not going to let oil through that and that's enormous leverage that I don't think even in the Islamic Republic

knew this could be so effective so I think from the perspective of where we we stand and maybe from the perspective well if there's some kind of agreement a ceasefire a real ceasefire that may last I think the leverage that Iranian side has proven they have is the control of that vital passage more than there are some people who argue, well, after this war, then it makes sense for the Islamic Republic to actually go and build the bomb. I would say, no, that's not necessary. Just do what you're doing if you want. So I see the logic of that argument.

but I think maybe maybe a more effective or not giving also the excuse to your adversaries would have been to stay within the limits of enrichment. And apparently that was part of the proposal the Iranians were bringing to the negotiating table just before the war. We don't know for sure, but some people who were involved in this last round of negotiations, not the ceasefire, but the negotiations that collapsed before the war started, which showed that the U.S. side was not really negotiating in good faith. It was just like a distraction or a kind of an excuse to go into war. But we have information that says the Iranians had come to the, the table saying, okay, we are going to halt our enrichment, which was effectively halted.

I mean, it was not completely taken out, but it was so badly damaged that Iran's enrichment was effectively halted. So they were saying, okay, we're not going to do enrichment, at least not for a while, and we're willing to negotiate over the 60% enriched 400 or so kilograms of uranium under some kind of international, maybe international atomic energy, some kind of a third party supervision, we can manage that and not be, in effect, I'm saying that had become a trap for Iran also. And perhaps a way out, if there's some kind of agreement with the U.S., I think this war showed that Iran has its most powerful leverage is what is doing right now. So I would put the nuclear issue second to the leverage that Iran has over its control over the state of hormones.

It can wreck the world economy. And the repercussions are beyond what Israel, of course, doesn't suffer by that. But the U.S. suffer. Americans, most of whom are already against this war, would suffer at the pump. And the world economy, countries of Asia are suffering, Africa, all because Iran has easy control it. It doesn't even have to use this ballistic missiles. It has these cheap drones. And all you need is to just send one of them to hit a tanker and you made a big mess to accomplish your objective. I know this is a bit simplification. And I don't want to to maybe the last thing I say is, it appears many observers look at this war

and see that everything being said and done, the Iranian side is politically victorious in this. They were not overthrown. Their entire leadership, the Supreme Leader's family, military leaders, political leaders were assassinated one after another, but the regime held together and was able to put out there the fierce resistance in a way on the cheap, on the cheap militarily, but you have to remember that Iran suffered tremendous damage. There's a very good article in Jacobin online by a friend of mine

who chronicles how, especially the Israelis, relentlessly and deliberately have tried through their bombing campaign to destroy as much as possible. Iran's industrial and technical capacity. They're deliberately attacking the university's research center, production of steel factories. They're trying to destroy the country's industrial and technological capability. And so Iran has already suffered in this war tremendously. I don't, I'm not celebrating anything.

obviously I don't celebrate the people of Iran, including my family numbers, being bombed so that the government scores a political victory. But it seems that at this moment, the Islamic Republic has survived, and it's the U.S. I think Trump made a big mistake. It was somehow prevailed upon by Netanyahu that this would be an easy thing. You go in there, bombed in a few days, and it would be all over. He went in there and now he's trapped. I don't think he wants to go back to war because of the enormous cost.

Midterm elections are coming up. People are against this war. The international economy might even go into a recession because of this war. So the American side has not had a victory. The Israelis don't care. The more chaos, the more destruction, they want to turn the whole region into a large Gaza, gazification, what I call it. They want Israel to be able to go anywhere it wants to bomb and destroy, anything it wants to,

and the more destruction and mayhem, the better. That's their end game. But I think Trump wants out, and his recent declaration that he is going to close the state of hormones is, as you said, absurd, because in whose interest, that be? If it closes the strait, then the flow of oil completely comes to a halt. And would that help the U.S. or Trump? No. So I don't think he knows what he's talking about. Absolutely. No, yeah, I think you make a very, very compelling case. And of course, to your point about Israel, when the ceasefire negotiations began, Israel went on this mass murder spree in southern Lebanon on April 8th in

particular, killing hundreds of innocent people. They're bombing schools, hospitals, they're bombing railroads. It's clear that for Israel, they do not want the war to end. They want to leverage U.S. military power to destroy Iranian society. They don't even really care about regime change. They would be very happy with turning Iran into the next Syria or Libya and just take it off the chess board altogether. They're a psychotic terrorist rogue regime for sure. And, you know, your argument about enrichment, I think, is really, really logical, and I totally understand it. The terrible position that Iran finds themselves in is that they are fundamentally negotiating with bad faith actors who have twice used negotiations themselves as cover for brutal attacks on Iranian people and the government, including decapitation strikes on their leadership. And so, like, when you're dealing with a monstrous enemy that isn't rational.

and that puts them in an incredibly difficult position. And my last point, and I'll end it here, and then you know, you can say your final words and we'll wrap up. I'm very appreciative of your knowledge and your time is that despite the Iranian people's legitimate grievances with their own government, which no doubt exists and have always existed, as your history points out, the sense that I get is that the Iranian people know that what's coming on the other end of a U.S. and Israel victory in Iran. Iran is not to their benefit or anybody else's and that there has been a rally around the flag sort of effect for the Iranian people that said, you know, we might not agree with our own government, but we sure as hell do not agree with the U.S. and Israel. Trump and Netanyahu, two of the most grotesque historical figures of our time coming in, destroying our society and implementing, you know, some sort of puppet dictatorship to do their bidding. Do you, do you basically agree with that take?

I agree with you generally going back to the anti-imperialist kind of premise of my book. I think this is an anti-imperialist war, no doubt about it, regardless of what we think of the Islamic Republic's repression towards its own people, which is true and significant. We should not ignore that. But they're standing up to, as you said, murderous, criminal, genocidal adversaries. And I think for that, the Islamic Republic has a lot of support and sympathy all over the world. It's the only country that has accomplished this. And in a sense, it's because their back is to the wall. The U.S. and Israel want to demolish them.

They want to ruin Iran. And they're resisting that. And so far successfully, the cost is, of course, enormous. And there is, I can see that too. There's a rallying around the flag, the surge of kind of nationalism. That too. To what extent has this strengthened the Islamic Republic politically? I think we have to wait until the war is over and see what kind of policies

the Islamic Republic coming out of this war is not the same regime that went into the war. If, I think, at the end of the war, it has an option. It could come out having, you know, withstood and in some ways defeated a major onslaught by U.S. imperialism and Israel. And hopefully, this is my hope, I don't know, it could kind of reconcile the people of Iran to some extent. No, I don't think it's going to offer them, you know, remotely like a democracy or, you know, total removal of all controls. But if it offers its own people some kind of a breathing space, not go the route of relentless repression and, you know, being even more repressive than before, maybe, there may be a path

to some kind of a transition in the long run. You know, wars do not end up into like a beautiful democratic aftermath. But I would say that I'm not totally pessimistic. There are those who say, well, okay, the Islamic Republic, even if it survives, is just going to become a totally relentlessly repressive regime. Why should they do that? I mean, there's no reason. The country needs to be rebuilt, the population, have badly suffered.

and we have to remember that these movements that I mentioned, they didn't ask for the regime's overthrow. Some did. Some people have in the last phase of protest as I think it's a sign of frustration. The regime may be very unpopular, but I want to be a bit maybe careful. I'm not trying to evade the question. But, you know, we don't really know.

I mean, to generalize and to say we can know where most people stand is difficult because it changes too. And most people are not at any given moment agreeing on everything anyway. So let's see what comes out as well. My hope is for some kind of a ceasefire to hold. And then we can see where we go from there. Absolutely. Professor Mateen Ascari, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been fascinating. You've taught me and certainly my audience so much. The book is Axis of Empire, a history of Iran, U.S. relations. I'm so grateful for you coming on our show today, and I would love to have you back on sometime to discuss even more of this fascinating history. Thank you. Thank you for having me, and thanks to your audience for being here with us. Thank you for listening. RevLeft Radio is 100% listener-funded. If you like what we need.

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