Abstract
Given Iran’s long-standing importance to US Cold War strategy, and the worrying decline in US—Soviet relations, it was inevitable that the Iranian Revolution would be framed as a Cold War crisis. At the same time, Carter was being told by some of his advisors, including Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and Brzezinski, that ‘the trend in strategic forces has favoured the Soviet Union since the mid 1960s’.1 Richard Lehman, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, warned that ‘Even without Iran, the power balance will be exceptionally delicate in the early to mid 1980s. In this period Soviet military strength will grow substantially relative to that of the US.’2 The week before Khomeini landed in Tehran, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff David Jones stressed the danger of Soviet advances in strategic and conventional forces and asked Congress to support an increase in military spending. Presenting his military posture statement for FY 1980, Jones warned that the Soviet emphasis on military power threatened to upset the delicate balance of stability in the global power arena.3
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Notes
James G. Blight and Janet M. Lang, ‘When Empathy Failed Using Critical Oral History to Reassess the Collapse of U.S.—Soviet Détente in the Carter—Brezhnev Years’, Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring 2010), 58–59.
Gloria Duffy, ‘Crisis Mangling and the Cuban Brigade’, International Security, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1983), 67.
Leo Sartori, ‘Will SALT II Survive?’, International Security, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1985/86), 148.
George Lenczowski, ‘The Arc of Crisis: Its Central Sector’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 47, No. 4 (1979), 796.
George Lenczowski, ‘The Arc of Crisis: Its Central Sector’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 57, No. 4 (1979), 816–818.
R. K. Ramazani, ‘Security in the Persian Gulf’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Spring 1979), 822.
Robert Moss, ‘Who’s Meddling in Iran’, New Republic 12 February 1978, Vol. 179, No. 23, pp. 15–18.
For scholarship on the Left, see Abrahamian, ‘Communism and Communalism in Iran: The Tudah and the Firqah-I Dimukrat’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 1, No. 4 (October, 1970): 291–316; Sepehr Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). For later works, see Ervand Abrahamian, Radical Islam: The Iranian Mojahedin (IB Tauris, 1989); Sepehr Zabih, The Left in Contemporary Iran (Hoover Press Publication, 1986); Homa Katouzian, ‘Khalil Maleki: The Odd Intellectual Out’, in Negin Nabavi, ed., Intellectual Trends in Twentieth-Century Iran (University Press of Florida, 2003), 24–52; Mohsen M. Milani, ‘Harvest of Shame: Tudeh and the Bazargan Government’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2 (1993), 307–320
R. K. Ramazani, ‘Iran’s Foreign Policy: Contending Orientations’, Middle East Journal, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Spring 1989), 203.
Eric Rouleau, ‘Khomeini’s Iran’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 59, No. 1 (1980), 18.
Roger Benjamin and John Kautsky, ‘Communism and Economic Development’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 62, No. 1 (1968), 122.
Maziar Behrooz, ‘Tudeh Factionalism and the 1953 Coup in Iran’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3 (2001), 376.
Negin Nabavi, ‘The Changing Concept of the “Intellectual” in Iran of the 1960s’, Iranian Studies, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1999), 336–338.
Mottahedeh, 291. For the intellectuals’ perception of the Tudeh in the 1940s, see Homa Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Literature of an Iranian Writer (London, 1991), 162–163. Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, who has come to be considered the ‘leading spokesman for the non-establishment Iranian intelligentsia’, has been written about extensively. See Michael Hillmann, ‘Cultural Dilemmas of an Iranian Literary Intellectual,’ in Iranian Culture: A Persianist View (London, 1990), 119–144; Brad Hanson, ‘The Westoxication of Iran: Depictions and Reactions of Beh-rangi, Al-e Ahmad and Shariati’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1 (February 1983): 1–23
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© 2013 Christian Emery
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Emery, C. (2013). Framing the Revolution as a Cold War Crisis. In: US Foreign Policy and the Iranian Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137329875_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137329875_3
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