1979: How the U.S. and Iran Went From Allies to Enemies

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Michael Barbaro** (0:33)
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. At the heart of the current US war against Iran is an inconvenient truth that the United States is in many ways responsible for bringing about the very regime that it now seeks to topple. Today, my colleague, Times Magazine contributor, Scott Anderson, tells us the story of America's outsized role in the Iranian Revolution, and why all these years later, we're still no closer to understanding Iran. It's Friday, June 12th.
Scott, welcome to The Daily.

**Scott Anderson** (1:39)
Thank you, it's very nice to be here.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:41)
It's great to have you here. We are at a moment in this almost four month long conflict between the United States and Iran, where the hostility and the distrust on both sides means that the ceasefire is kind of in name only.

**Scott Anderson** (1:59)
Right, kind of a postmodern type of ceasefire.

**Michael Barbaro** (2:02)
Exactly, and the peace talks that are supposed to be built atop that postmodern shaky ceasefire are pretty much a mess.
And at the heart of this all is a profound decades old hatred, and I don't think that's too strong a word, between the governments of Iran and the US. And it's a hatred whose origins we've never quite definitively told the story of on this show. And you not long before the war began, told that story in what turned out to be a very well timed book called King of Kings. And what your book so powerfully recounts is that this relationship between the US and Iran wasn't always filled with animus. On the contrary, within the past 50 years, the US relationship with Iran went from a deeply intertwined alliance that was respectful and at times even affectionate to this much darker thing that we now know today.

**Scott Anderson** (3:03)
That's right. If you go back exactly 50 years ago today, Iran was America's most important ally between Western Europe and Japan. The two economies were inextricably linked.
Economically, of course, we were getting Iranian oil. Iran was by far the biggest buyer of American arms abroad.

**Michael Barbaro** (3:22)
Wow. Claims, missiles, bonds.

**Scott Anderson** (3:25)
Everything short of nuclear weapons.

**Michael Barbaro** (3:26)
Kind of a staggering thing to contemplate today.

**Scott Anderson** (3:30)
It really is. 50,000 Americans were living in Iran, and 50,000 Iranian students were studying at American universities. The Shah had visited the United States a dozen times over his reign. He had met seven different presidents at the White House, and American presidents had come to Tehran to meet with him.

**Michael Barbaro** (3:46)
It's like an alternate universe.

**Scott Anderson** (3:47)
Yes. They were incredibly close. What is ironic in a story full of ironies is that the very closeness of that relationship between the Americans and the Iranians carried the seeds of the revolution that was to come.

**Michael Barbaro** (4:02)
And Scott, in your book, you explained that historians still marvel at the improbability of the revolution that you just referred to, this total inferno of a rejection of the West in a country so thoroughly dominated by a partnership with the West.

**Scott Anderson** (4:22)
No, that's right, and how this all just unraveled over the course of a year is just astonishing. And in looking at the dynamics of the revolution, there seemed so many moments when if something had played out just slightly different, if someone had made a decision or not made a decision, it all could have played out very, very differently or been aborted altogether.
It wasn't like going into a house and opening the wrong door. It was like going into a house and opening 43 wrong doors in a row.

**Michael Barbaro** (4:54)
That's what happened here.

**Scott Anderson** (4:54)
Yeah.

**Michael Barbaro** (5:02)
Well, let's begin our effort to understand how so many wrong doors were opened by first really making sense of how it ever was the case that the United States and Iran became such full intertwined partners. Because as we're making very clear here, that doesn't make much sense given where we are today, but it obviously made all the sense in the world while it was actually happening. So what is the story of how these two countries and militaries, governments and economies became so interwoven?