The Conduct of American Foreign Policy: Return to the Cold War?

Seldom in recent history has the attention of the world been so closely focused on a single geographical region as it was in 1980. The region was known before the First World War as "the Middle East," to distinguish it from "the Near East," the Levantine countries whose shores were washed by the eastern Mediterranean. It had then loomed large on the maps of British statesmen concerned to protect their Indian dominions and communications in the "Great Game" they were playing against the encroaching power of the Russian Empire. Now that the term "Middle East" has been extended to cover the whole region lying between the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the mountain tableland of Central Asia, a new name has been devised to cover these counties on which attention has been concentrated during the past 12 months-Southwest Asia: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and the oil-bearing states bordering what now must tactfully be termed simply "the Gulf," all constituting a politically seismic zone of incalculable explosive potential.

Nobody doubted that the Iranian revolution of 1978-79 was a major historic event whose consequences would take many years to work themselves out. It did not yet signify a major transformation in the global balance between the Soviet Union and the United States. Rather, in its fundamentalist rejection both of Marxism and of "Western values," in its search for indigenous roots within an Islamic culture equally hostile to both, it revealed how superficial, almost trivial, had been the analysis of both Western and Soviet statesmen who had attempted to force so complex a society into their own simplistic and intellectually impoverished frameworks. The Iranians were rejecting the entire international system of which they saw themselves, with some reason, to have been the victims for a century and a half; a system that had enabled British, Russians and, latterly, Americans to manipulate Iranian politics and the Iranian economy as, in their superior Western wisdom, they thought fit. The unfortunate American diplomatic mission, seized in November 1979 and held captive throughout 1980, was the object of a populist rage that needed scapegoats-a rage beyond the power of law, reason or statesmanship to control.