A book analyzes American foreign policy during Jimmy Carter's presidency, which marked the change in U.S.-Iranian relations.
The prestigious publishing house Palgrave Macmillan has published the doctoral thesis that Javier Gil carried out in the project 'Religion and Civil Society' of the ICS, in which he analyzed recently declassified documents.
The prestigious publishing house Palgrave Macmillan has published The Carter Administration and the Fall of Iran's Pahlavi Dynasty. US-Iran Relations on the Brink of the 1979 Revolution. This is the new book by Javier Gil Guerrero, partner of Institute for Culture and Society (ICS).
The Issue corresponds with the publication of the thesis that Javier Gil defended in 2014 with the degree scroll 'Opening Pandora's Box: Jimmy Carter, The Persian Gulf and the Rise of Militant Islam (1977-1981)'(Abriendo la caja de Pandora: Jimmy Carter, el Golfo Persa y el auge del Islam militante (1977-1981)). The research was conducted at the framework of the ICS project 'Religion and Civil Society'.
The book deals with the study of American foreign policy during the term of Democratic President Jimmy Carter and its relationship with the Iranian revolution of 1979. Javier Gil Guerrero, through documents that have recently been declassified, offers a new vision of the forces that allowed Khomeini's triumph, of the altered perception that the Americans had of Islam and of the change in the relations between the United States and Iran.
Among other issues, the author analyzes the differences between Washington and Tehran regarding human rights and arms exports, the divisions within the White House itself, and the uncertainty of the Iranian Shah regarding the support of the American president.
A brief summary of the book
During the first two years of Carter's presidency, Iran entered a spiral of violence and unrest that ended with the exile of the Shah and the establishment of an Islamic Republic. The Iranian revolution was at first ignored by U.S. diplomats and intelligence services. When Carter finally realized the extent of the unrest in Iran, he refused to explicitly endorse the iron fist policy called for by the Shah.
The Iranian monarch was unwilling to deal decisively with the protests without Carter's backing and pursued a failed policy mixing concessions and repression, which only served to postpone the inevitable.
The sources gathered point out that a belated process of political liberalization encouraged by U.S. officials only served to weaken the Shah's authority.