Iranian Leaders Research Articles

The Worldflash of a Coming Future

The Worldflash of a Coming Future

Informally special? The Churchill–Truman talks of January 1952 and the state of Anglo-American relations

When Churchill became Prime Minister and Anthony Eden Foreign Secretary in 1951 they had to try to adjust Britain's world role to match her capabilities, while confronting a wide range of problems. Britain faced a balance-of-payments crisis and troublesome questions from the USA about both dollar aid and trade with Communists. In the Middle East the nationalization of the massive Anglo-Iranian Oil Company operations by the Iranian leader Mossadeq was another difficult issue: Britain emphasized the need to coerce the Iranians in order to safeguard her economic interests, whereas the Americans saw Cold War dangers in pressurizing Iran. They feared British policy would destabilize Iran and create opportunities for a Communist takeover. In Egypt also, nationalist forces caused a division between the two allies, with the USA evincing more caution for fear of being tainted with colonialism and thereby alienating Third World countries from the Western camp. In Europe, Britain dragged her feet on integration and the creation of a European Army, which made more difficult the agreed aim of rearming Germany. In NATO the British resented the appointment of an American as the Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic (SACLANT); and they worried about America's strategic plans and general stance towards the Soviets, and about the atom bomb regarding both its possible use and the breakdown of wartime Anglo-US cooperation. There were American doubts about the integrity of Britain's security after the Klaus Fuchs spy case and her failure to make reforms suggested by the Americans, and there were relatively minor disagreements on such issues as the choice of a standard rifle for NATO and the location of NATO headquarters. The most immediate trouble-spot for Anglo-US relations, however, was the Far East where there were differences about the Korean War, the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Nationalist Chinese on Formosa, and the Japanese Peace Treaty.

Family Planning and Contraceptive Use in Iran, 1967-1992

The official family planning program of Iran launched April 1967 aimed to reduce annual population growth to 1% within twenty years. Although somewhat successful the program failed to realize its rather ambitious goal. At its peak in 1977 the program served only 11% of women of reproductive age. Efforts slowed with the Islamic revolution of 1979 and ultimately came to a halt for about eight years. Rates of child survival increased during the 1980s amid generally adverse economic conditions brought on by the countrys high rates of inflation and unemployment which together increased demand for contraception and contraceptive services. Results of the 1986 census clearly pointed to the urgent need for family planning in Iran. The government therefore created in 1989 another family planning program which has been gaining political ideological and economic support ever since. The delivery of contraceptive services and supplies was resumed with the government renewing its political and financial commitment to the program and its goals with the interest support and guidance of religious leaders. Levels of contraceptive knowledge and use have increased since the start of the program. Clergy support helped make population and family planning issues of concern to all social classes. This power of Iranian religious leaders to legitimize family planning has significant implications for other Muslim countries dealing with similar population issues.

Soviet Conceptualizations of the Iranian Revolution

In the five years that have passed since the fall of the shah and the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the hopes expressed in these early evaluations have been broadly disappointed. If on one hand the institutional framework built-up under the charismatic leadership of Ayatollah Ruhallah Khumayni and his Islamic Republican Party (IRP) has proven relatively stable, the nature of "Islamic" institutions has evolved in unexpected directions. The revolution has not created a significantly improved climate of relations between Iran and the USSR, and the vision of a revolutionary process pushing and with Western Europe. Soviet evaluations of the Iranian revolution have soured accordingly. 4 Setting the tone for the more critical perspective which now dominates Soviet one prestigious commentator has emphasized the reactionary forces within the Iranian leadership and the regime as an "Islamic despotism."

Using Positive Sanctions to End International Conflicts: Iran and the Arab Gulf Countries

Efforts by the Gulf Co-operation Council to persuade Iran to end its war with Iraq in exchange for access to a large amount of capital during the late spring of 1982 were not only ignored by the Iranian government but also met with greatly increased demands for reparations on the part of Iranian leaders. This event raises at least two important questions regarding the use of positive sanctions as a way of ending inter national conflicts: under what conditions an offer of positive sanctions will be made and under what conditions such an offer will be accepted or refused. These questions can be addressed from at least two very different perspectives. In domestic political terms, small principalities such as those on the Arab side of the Arab/Persian Gulf have a variety of incentives to use rewards in their dealings with more powerful neighbors, particularly if they have a reservoir of fungible resources from which to draw. In structural terms, when the distribution of capabilities in a region such as the Gulf is changing from a bipolar to a multipolar one, countries whose situation is improving will have several incentives to try to bring regional conflicts to an end using positive sanctions. Thus there is little basis for choosing between these two perspectives as a better explanation for why rewards were offered to Iran to end its war with Iraq during June 1982. But structural features of the Gulf region provide a considerably better explanation for why this offer was rejected than domestic political factors do. Domestic-level arguments explaining the rejection of rewards contradict the logic according to which their having been offered in the first place is explained. Structural aspects of the situation in the Gulf in early 1982 not only predict that smaller countries should have tried to use rewards to settle conflict in the area but also suggest why larger combatants will not accept such an offer. This finding indirectly supports Kenneth Waltz's argument that conflicts in a multipolar world will be both more likely to occur and more difficult to solve.

American Relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, 1979–1981

The triumph of the Khomeini forces and of the Iranian revolution in February 1979, sweeping away the old imperial regime and the transitional Bakhtiyar government, marked the beginning of a highly critical period in American-Iranian relations. The conflict culminated in the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran and in the holding of U.S. diplomats as hostages for well over a year. The hostage issue was the most controversial question for U.S. foreign policy in 1980 and marked a historic low point in relations between the two countries.From the viewpoint of most Iranian leaders, this battle was an inevitable one. Based on their perceptions of bilateral relations over the previous three decades, Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters expected a deterministically hostile United States. In their eyes, Washington had provided the main foreign support for the shah, a regime for which their passionate hatred can scarcely be overstated, and had tried to prevent the revolution's triumph.

The education of Iranian Leaders in Europe and America

The education of Iranian Leaders in Europe and America