As the excavation of the foreign policy of Richard Nixon's presidency continues, Roham Alvandi's ambitious new volume makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the era. Alvandi convincingly shows that Mohammad Reza Shah was not just a bystander trapped between Cold War superpowers, but a figure of outsized influence among third world leaders. This was largely due, as the author points out, to the position of U.S.-Iranian relations within the framework of the Nixon Doctrine, which gave more autonomy to the shah and stunningly revised the longstanding American strategy of containment in the Middle East.
The shah became a true Cold War partner of President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, and Iran was able to shape American policy towards, not just Iran and the Middle East, but other regions such as South Asia. This arrangement continued for as long as Nixon and Kissinger retained a strong grasp on American foreign policy, and for as long as the shah could be helpful in restraining Soviet actions in the Middle East. That is to say, the apogee of U.S.-Iranian relations during the entire postwar period was reached in the early 1970s, until Nixon became embroiled in Watergate and his ability to wage an unfettered foreign policy abated due to greater Congressional oversight.
The author's four chapters nearly stand alone as case studies, and it is the latter three where the most original contributions can be found. The well-written, well-edited work draws on newly declassified American government records, some appearing for the first time, as well as indirect Iranian sources. While, on balance, the book has a U.S.-centric feel, the author was able to partially overcome the lack of open archives in Iran with the inclusion of Iranian materials such as memoirs, diaries, oral histories, interviews, and correspondence. Until archives are more open in Tehran, this book will likely be the standard work on the subject. Alvandi shows that the seeds for the special relationship between Iran and the U.S. during the Nixon years were planted nearly twenty years earlier. In 1953, Vice President Nixon first met Mohammad Reza Shah, and by the early 1970s the relationship had matured such that the shah “was able to shape the formation and implementation of the Nixon Doctrine in the Persian Gulf region” (29).
It is difficult to criticize a book that is so groundbreaking on the whole, but the author is less convincing on two fronts. First, and while this is open to debate, it is possible that the shah was not quite as important in Nixon-Kissinger foreign policymaking as the author argues. For example, rarely does the shah feature in the many far-ranging discussions on the Nixon tapes about foreign policy strategy, even on subjects related to the Middle East. Instead, the shah pops up only periodically when certain subjects are discussed: restraining Soviet aggression in the Middle East, reassuring allies in advance of Nixon's visit to China, or the expelling of Taiwan from the UN General Assembly and Security Council, or, by 1973, an emerging American energy policy and relations with oil rich states. At the same time, approximately 700 hours of these secretly made recordings have not been released by the National Archives, and a fair number relate to the Middle East.
Secondly, while the book makes frequent reference to the Nixon Doctrine, and convincingly argues that policy towards Iran was part of the framework of the Nixon Doctrine, the author does not weigh in directly on a debate that has been hard to ignore. Due to the fact that the announcement of what became known as the Nixon Doctrine caught advisors such as Henry Kissinger by surprise, as the author points out, and because it was not announced in a major speech but rather in a press gaggle after a speech focused primarily on Vietnam, some scholars have concluded that the Nixon Doctrine was never meant to be a global doctrine, and instead applied primarily to a possible future American role in Southeast Asia. This view is best represented by Jeffrey Kimball.
On the other hand, as more records have been released by the National Archives, other scholars have found evidence that the Nixon Doctrine was to have application to other, non-Vietnam, parts of the world. The Nixon tapes even include conversations in which Nixon refers to the Doctrine himself as having such importance, and these mentions also found their way into other records, such as the Nixon-Pompidou conversations during their summit at Reykjavik in 1973. While not a “global” or “strategic” doctrine—if such a thing were even possible—scholars such as Dan Caldwell have argued that the Nixon Doctrine indeed was intended to have broader application than just Vietnam, though obviously there were parts of the world that Nixon thought were less important than others. The problem with the volume under review is that there is no mention of this debate. It is simply assumed that the Nixon Doctrine had application to U.S.-Iranian relations, and in fact was the locus for such relations during the Nixon presidency. That is no small assumption.
Quibbles aside, for those keeping up on the burgeoning wave of new Nixon-era scholarship, Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah is required reading, and Roham Alvandi has marked himself as an exciting scholar whose book is a welcome contribution to this field.
