Carter’s Government’s Cognition And Response To The Islamic Revolution In Iran （1977-1981）

At the beginning of his term,Carter inherited the general direction of the Nixon-Ford administration’s diplomatic approach to Iran and did not see Iran as an object in foreign affairs that needed urgent adjustment.Against this backdrop,neither the U.S.Embassy in Iran nor the White House intelligence community initially believed that Iran’s Pahlavi regime was facing a crisis of downfall.On November 9,1978,Sullivan sent an important message to the White House entitled "Thinking the Unthinkable," which led to the first recognition by U.S.policy makers that the Pahlavi regime was in danger of losing its throne,and was accepted internally.Sullivan’s message was accepted internally.The relatively limited advisory role played by the White House intelligence community in the course of the Iranian revolution contrasts sharply with the influence of Sullivan’s later messages on the White House hierarchy.The decision to abandon the Pahlavi regime was not made at the top of the Carter administration directly after Sullivan’s November 9,1978 cable,and the White House did not make the decision to abandon the Pahlavi regime until after Pahlavi accepted the demands of the domestic opposition.In the process of dealing with the revolutionary situation in Iran,the U.S.policymakers showed the historical characteristics of "no direct involvement","insufficient intelligence",and "always putting its own strategic interests first".These three types of characteristics constituted the intrinsic motivation for the Carter administration to abandon the Pahlavi regime.After Pahlavi’s exile,the U.S.had to face various negative impacts arising from the Iranian revolution,including the loss of Pahlavi as an important regional partner,the oil crisis caused by the reduction of Iranian oil production,the hostage crisis,and the collapse of the "twin pillars" system in the Persian Gulf.To curb these four types of effects,the Carter administration responded with a series of countermeasures.By looking at the Carter administration’s perceptions of the Iranian Revolution and its strategies for dealing with its post-revolutionary negative effects as a whole,it is possible to see more clearly the overall context of U.S.-Iranian relations during the Carter years and consequently to understand why the Iranian Revolution can be described as a new and unprecedented phenomenon in the post-war international political process in the Persian Gulf.The shifting trends in U.S.-Iranian relations and the waxing and waning of international political power intertwined with these trends point to significant changes in the Cold War structure of the Persian Gulf region.At the same time,the Iranian energy issue also had a global impact,which in the course of subsequent history shaped the relationship between the U.S.,Japan,and the Soviet Union,and to some extent transcended the scope of the changing Cold War structure in the Persian Gulf.