Iran: America’s Achilles heel
Ayatollah Khomeini, the Shah (Reza Pahlavi) and Trump
The ironic background to the much-awaited Memorandum of Understanding is Trump’s and his courtiers’ lack of interest in understanding Iran. Iran induces profound dysfunction in America’s international relations. A mixture of ignorance, wrong assumptions and incompetence, all products of hubris, come to the fore. The best result now for Trump is returning to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JPCOA) nuclear agreement with Iran, and resolving a pressing new problem, unblocking the Strait of Hormuz.
In May 2018, Trump pulled the USA out of the JPCOA, agreed with Iran by Obama, UK, France, Russia, China, Germany, and the European Union, which curtailed any significant enrichment of uranium — ending 2030 — in exchange for lifting some sanctions. It had been hard-won. The JPCOA had sensibly separated the nuclear issue from more regional grievances against Iran.
Under Trump, the US attacked Iran on 28 February in the midst of negotiations over its nuclear material that were making progress. Both possession and use of nuclear weapons were declared haram, forbidden, by the then Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Having the means at hand to build one in the face of threats from nuclear powers is another matter.
Spurning diplomacy had a long track record. In 1953, a CIA coup — carried out in collaboration with Britain, stopping the nationalising of Iran’s oil — shut the door on a promising move towards democracy under Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Trump’s recent military attacks on the country, despite the near certainty that the regime would shut the Strait of Hormuz, are the latest example.
Is there some explanation for the USA perennially choosing the most counter-productive intervention in Iran ? Scott Anderson’s King of Kings: The Fall of the Shah and the Revolution That Forged Modern Iran (Penguin, 2025) sheds some light.
Like a drama-doc film director, Anderson tells much of the story through portraits of key figures: “minor” Americans for small print detail and for the big story major figures, Jimmy Carter’s team, alongside the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, his wife Farah Diba and appointees, versus Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s coterie and advisers. Combining journalistic and research skills, he takes a broad sweep of Persian history, carrying the reader expertly through a detailed build-up to the insurrectionary storm that swept away a key ally of the USA. King of Kings tells the sorry tale, building up suspense with illuminating local detail during the 1970s, providing copious footnotes and a superb index.
In the 1970s, US withdrawal from the Vietnam War, and then preparing the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, took up most foreign policy time and discussion. The State Department and CIA had almost no Farsi speakers. American Embassy staff in Tehran moved frequently and had insufficient time to build up experience or learn Farsi; they lived in a private enclave, few with any experience outside the capital. They became predominantly intermediaries for the US military-industrial complex serving the prodigious demands of the Shah for the latest planes and military equipment. He was too valuable a customer to be criticized. This attitude characterized the National Security Council (NSC) and CIA which, along with State, led on policy towards Iran, and influenced President Jimmy Carter.
No-one was much bothered when, in October 1978, Saddam Hussein expelled Ayatollah Khomeini after 13 years, from the Shi’a centre of Najaf in Iraq, fearing he might generate resistance to his dictatorship. But, for some time Khomeini had been sending recordings of his inflammatory speeches into Iran, denouncing the Shah and the USA. He moved to Neauphle-le-Château, west of Versailles, which promptly developed into a Shi’a pilgrimage site.
There, what Anderson calls “the three Viziers”, Western-educated émigrés lead by the canny American, Dr. Ebrahim Yazdi, buffered journalists and visiting diplomats from Khomenei’s ferocious denunciations of the Shah and his American backers. Their translations filtered out much of the Ayatollah’s religious extremism, possibly believing the more “humanistic” spin they put into his mouth — a deadly miscalculation.
But thousands of poorer Iranians, and hundreds of émigré European visitors who trod a path to Neauphle, treated Khomeini as a living saint, his leadership boosted by street protests throughout Iran and their subsequent repression. In December 1978, the Shah made a hopelessly belated democratic gesture, supporting a Regency Council under a moderate Prime Minister, Sharpour Bakhtiar. Seen as too close to the Shah, Sharpour was already discredited in the eyes of protesters. The loyalty of his generals, whom the Shah had kept out of contact with each other for fear of plots, had been whittled away. His military commanders, accustomed to waiting on orders from on high, might have mounted a coup – but at the cost of unfathomable casualties and uncertain success. Indecisive and divided, they stepped back. Fierce civil disorder became overwhelming.
Suddenly, it was all over for the Shah. The Pahlavis’ Boeing 707 took off from Mehrabad airport early in the afternoon of 16 January 1979. Two weeks later, on 1st February, an unsmiling Ayatollah Khomeini landed amidst ecstatic crowds.
The US government, struggling to agree how to act in the crisis, got it wrong almost until the end, relying on wishful thinking rather than hard information and analysis, hoping the insurrection would fizzle out. The Cold War warrior, National Security Council director Zbigniew Brzezinski, believed the real danger came from the Iranian Communist Party, Tudeh. The notion that the 76 year-old Khomeini would settle for a democratic government influenced by Shi’a principles was for the birds. The State would adopt God’s governance, he proclaimed, implemented by himself as Supreme Leader. Enter the velayat al-faqih, the rule of the Islamic jurists.
The new Constitution, though, written by a 73-member Council of Religious Experts under Khomenei’s direction, was a theocratic-Republican hybrid. A directly elected President and an elected Parliament were to be controlled by an unelected 12 man Council of Guardians, six jurists and six mullahs — a concession to promises made during Khomeini’s exile. The hordes of street protesters coalesced to become another focus of power, the IRGC, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps answering to the Supreme Leader. Anderson surprisingly neglects the constitutional origins of today’s complex political relationships.
The violence of Khomeini’s language in exile heralded the incoming violence of the regime. All opposition was “Satan’s work”. The revolutionary courts sentenced hundreds to summary execution; probably some 8,000 were ultimately killed. Estimates indicate four times this number of civilians were shot down by security forces in the January 2026 massacres of protestors under his successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the latest of many such massacres in his three decades of rule. The threat and brutal use of violence remains an integral feature of Iran’s theocratic governments.
Trump and his administration today show little interest in Iran’s unique political structure and thinking. The assassinations of what the CIA called “Iran’s leadership” had the one principal result: the future would increasingly be in the hands of the hardline elements of the IRGC, and the US treated with justifiable suspicion.
The Iranian people are in a worse situation than before the war. With sinking popularity polls, Trump is desperate to pull back in the face of upcoming mid-term elections in November. Iran — the 1979 hostage crisis — finished off politically one of the USA’s best recent Presidents, Jimmy Carter. It may soon finish off one of the very worst.
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