The Cold War along the Inner Asian frontier: Iran, 1945--1963

This dissertation is a study of the origins and development of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War rivalry in Iran from 1945 to 1963 and its influence on the political, economic, and social development of the country. It begins by tracing the origins of the Cold War rivalry in Iran to the Anglo-Russian competition, which had persisted since the nineteenth century, and how it led to a joint occupation of the country in 1941 during the Second World War. It then examines the beginning of American involvement in Iran in 1942 as part of the Allied war effort and how the United States gradually superseded Britain as American-Soviet rivalry came to replace Anglo-Russian rivalry.;The dissertation argues that United States policy toward Iran was exclusively one of containment, the goal of which was to keep Iran from falling to Communism. It traces the development of the policy of containment through the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations and examines whether there were any elements of continuity among the three administrations in achieving the goal of containment. The dissertation also provides an in-depth analysis of the response of the Shah and the Iranian government to foreign power rivalry in Iran, which included a variety of measures ranging from the Third Power Strategy to Negative Equilibrium and later, Positive Nationalism.;The dissertation concludes that although the U.S. policy of containment prevented Iran from falling to Communism, it nevertheless set the course for an entirely different phenomenon that was to haunt the United States decades later, in 1979. By the time Cold War tensions in Iran came to an end in 1963, the foundations of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 had already been put in place. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was, after all, a violent reaction to the Shah's White Revolution, which was itself a by-product of Cold War policies.