The Shah of Iran wanted a 'modern', industrial nation, modeled on the US and Western Europe. Needless to say, he failed, but many of his opponents were also surprised.
Gary Sick reported an anecdote about the visit of the Shah’s son Crown Prince Reza to the United States in 1978 to get flight training in Texas. Sick described him as an “altogether normal teenager, with a range of interests and enthusiasms quite typical of his age”, and recalled another occasion when the Shah “repeatedly attempted to persuade him and his sister to turn down the volume of the rock music they were playing”, since the Shah himself preferred jazz. “Altogether normal” by American standards, perhaps, but not at all by Iranian ones, where he was among of the most privileged of the privileged, part of a regime that had no future and would soon be replaced by an even worse one—one that would use much harsher methods to persuade the kids to turn down the volume. They hated both jazz and rock.
Of the many critical errors in American foreign policy over the years, not a few were based on these elite contacts with Third World countries, but globalization ran in many directions, not simply between Washington and other capitals. Reported by mass media all over the world, the great youth rebellion of the 1960s found plenty of combustible raw materials. Many of the Iranian militants and revolutionaries who overthrew the Shah and stormed the U.S. embassy had “spent their formative political years in U.S. universities during the height of the anti-Vietnam protests of the late-1960s and early-1970s”, and then gone home radicalized. This type of unexpected globalization, the music, blue jeans, hairstyles, the ubiquitous peace sign, spread everywhere among educated, middle class youth, and Tokyo, Paris, Prague, Mexico City all had revolts in 1968, and for a short time, America offered a more appealing style of rebellion than anything the Soviet Union could match.
Yet the student radicals had as distorted a view of the United States as men like the Shah, whose mindset had evidently frozen sometime in the 1950s. Both Shah and radicals alike regarded the United States as omniscient, omnipotent and omni-competent, a 20th Century Rome, while millions of revolutionaries also imagined that it had many young idealists like themselves who would identify with their causes. They all failed to see the reality, that the U.S. was neither and imperial and aristocratic civilization nor a romantic and revolutionary one, but mainly puritan and lower middle class. Never a natural as an empire, often fumbling, shortsighted and inept in its foreign policy, it rarely understood most of the world it was supposedly running, except the English-speaking elites who told American officials what they wanted to hear.
Sick noticed “the student militants, and some key Iranian officials, cuing with rapt attention on every second devoted to them on U.S. television”, a phenomenon not exactly unknown to the young guerillas of 1968. The U.S. government was never completely paranoid when it blamed TV for inciting riot, rebellion and mayhem, even if it tended to confuse causes with effects. A final irony in all this is that many of the idealistic young would end up very disappointed with the final form their revolution took in Iran, but that is usually the case in history.[1] In the end, many revolutions turned out to be more traditionalist than either progressive or conservative modernizers imagined.
[1] Gary Sick, All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter With Iran (Penguin, 1986), 71, 299
