A newcomer to the "Middle East" (a term not yet coined) in the 19th century, America emerged as the dominant Western power in the region after 1945. As the Second World War spilled into the Cold War, Iran’s inexperienced young monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi tried to find his place in the era’s delicate diplomacy as he faced a country in crisis. He took his first trip to the US in 1949 and was greeted warmly by the American public. Upon his return, however, he had to confront the rising tide of dissent at home, from Communists to Islamists. It was in this context that Iran pursued a bill to nationalize its oil industry. As America tried to assume the role of mediator between Britain and Iran, it ended up on the wrong side of the dispute. A coup removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq from power and tarnished the shah’s rule, and America’s image, thereafter.

This panel brings together the complicated diplomatic and social history of America and Iran during the Cold War to argue that the rift in US-Iranian relations had to do with more than the Mosaddeq coup or the dramatic shift in Iranian politics after 1979. Iran was confronted with competing nationalisms along its borders, forcing it to adopt a defensive posture. Domestically, it had to contend with deepening social unrest and inequality.

During these decades, America and Iran operated on both elite and non-elite levels. As a result, they created deep but sometimes unconnected networks that showed the ways in which social divisions affected diplomacy. These divides became reflected in the emerging Iranian student groups in the United States and the burgeoning Iranian American diasporic community.

The papers on this panel will explore the following topics: America’s role in pursuing a “utopic” ideal of development in Iran that challenges the era’s modernization theories; Iran’s pragmatic diplomacy with Pakistan by enabling the passage of US arms in the context of the 1971 war that led to the independence of Bangladesh; and notions of race in US-Iranian relations during an era of global civil rights. All the papers draw on Persian and English unpublished diplomatic sources; visual sources; and lesser used popular journals. Together, these papers show the dynamic and complicated ties between the United States and Iran in a fluid social and international context.