AN AUGURY OF REVOLUTION: THE IRANIAN STUDENT ...

did not desire the establishment of a theocracy in Iran. Many Islamists, including Khomeini’s
more moderate associates who had studied abroad, also had contention with the route that the
revolution took. Bani-Sadr was eventually impeached in 1981, and Qotbzadeh was executed in
1982 for supposedly plotting against the government. 547 Therefore, despite one of the most
explosive revolutions of the twentieth century, the ideals of the majority of Iranian student
protesters from the 1960s were unrealized. There is once again a burgeoning Iranian student
movement in the twenty-first century.
The impact of collapse of the shah’s regime on U.S. foreign policy was drastic.
Following the Iranian Revolution, hostage crisis, the Iran-Contra affair, the Iran-Iraq War, and
two invasions of Iraq, the United States has failed to find a reliable Muslim ally in the Middle
East. In the 1960s, the intersection of Iranian student protest and American foreign policy served
as an ever-present reminder that U.S. policy in the region was flawed. However, consecutive
administrations in Washington made many decisions, highlighted by Nixon and Kissinger’s May
1972 trip to Tehran, which further entangled the future of U.S. foreign policy in the region with
the fate of the shah. While historian Jeremi Suri argues that détente was a conservative reaction
to the international unrest of the 1960s, it is difficult to apply this paradigm to U.S. – Iranian
relations. Instead, the tightening of U.S. – Iranian relations was a pragmatic policy decision that
was the result of Realpolitik philosophy. With the threat of Iranian rapprochement with the
Soviet Union, the weakening of American military capabilities after the Vietnam War, the
British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf, and the alteration of Middle Eastern politics following
the Six Day War, policymakers in Washington viewed the shah as the guardian of the Persian
Gulf.
547 Refer to Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution & Secret Deals with the U.S., trans.
William Ford. McLean (Virginia: Brassey’s, Inc., 1991); Jerome, The Man in the Mirror.
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