During the 1980 U.S. presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan often joked that Jimmy Carter came to him in a dream and asked him why he wanted his job. “I told him I didn’t want his job,” Reagan quipped. “I want to be president.”
In the American popular imagination, Carter is often cast as a failed one-term president who could not tame inflation, bemoaned a national malaise, and found himself humiliated when, in 1979, anti-American revolutionaries in Iran overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the country’s U.S.-aligned ruler, and later held 52 Americans hostage in the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
A century of dependency
Foreign intervention did not come to an end with the 1979 revolution. No, as shown by Yassamine Mather, Iran’s Islamic rulers are more than willing to do the bidding of US-controlled international institutions
At the end of World War I the British empire was forced to assess the situation in the Middle East, given the dramatic changes in the international order: the fall of the German and Ottoman empires, the overthrow of the Russian tsar and the coming to power of the Bolsheviks had all played their part in destroying the balance of power in the region - especially in countries such as Iran, whose territory had been contested by British, Russian, German and Ottoman forces.