America and Iran
A History, 1720 to the Present
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- 117,99 zł
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- 117,99 zł
Publisher Description
Selected as one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times
In recent times, the United States and Iran have seemed closer to war than peace, but that is not where their story began. When America was in its infancy, Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams turned to the history of the Persian Empire as they looked for guidance on how to run their new country. And in the following century, Iranian newspapers heralded America as an ideal that their own government might someday emulate. How, then, did the two nations become the adversaries that they are today?
In this rich, fascinating history, John Ghazvinian traces the complex story of America and Iran over three centuries. Drawing on years of research conducted in both countries – including access to Iranian government archives rarely available to Western scholars – he leads us through the four seasons of US-Iranian relations: from the spring of mutual fascination, where Iran, sick of duplicitous Britain and Russia interfering in its affairs, sought a relationship with the United States, to the long, dark winter of hatred that we are yet to see end. A revealing account, America and Iran lays bare when, where and how it all went wrong – and why it didn’t have to be this way.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The hostility between the U.S. and Iran is a tragic lapse from a once-friendly relationship, according to this sweeping study. Historian Ghazvinian (coeditor, American and Muslim Worlds Before 1900) surveys American-Iranian relations back to colonial Americans' support for Persia in conflicts with the Turks and Tehran's perennial desire for closer ties to the U.S. as a counterweight against British and Russian domination in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Iranians' pro-American outlook soured, he contends, when the C.I.A. orchestrated the 1953 coup against liberal nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and then lavished arms on Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's unpopular dictatorship. After the Shah's overthrow in 1979, Iranian rage and American cluelessness precipitated the U.S. embassy hostage crisis. Ghazvinian blames present-day antagonism mostly on America, arguing that Iran's conciliatory efforts, from arms-for-hostages initiatives to the Iran nuclear deal, have met with rebuffs, betrayals, and sanctions, as well as on Israel for playing a major role in sabotaging potential rapprochements. Ghazvinian distills much complicated history into a lucid, graceful narrative studded with vivid profiles, including a description of populist president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as "he son of a blacksmith, greasy and disheveled in appearance, so full of godly piety that he rarely dressed in anything more formal than a zip-up windbreaker." The result is a nuanced, illuminating, and much-needed corrective to one-sided vilifications of Tehran.