Review of Axis of Empire: A History of Iran–US Relations by Afshin Matin-Asgari (Verso Books, 2026) and Enduring Hostility: The Making of America’s Iran Policy by Dalia Dassa Kaye (Stanford University Press, 2025).
Two new histories on US-Iran relations ask why these nations, once strategically linked by Cold War imperatives, have been hostile to one another for almost half a century. While Afshin Matin-Asgari’s Axis of Resistance: A History of Iran-U.S. Relations offers an illuminating account of the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath, Enduring Hostility: The Making of America’s Iran Policy by Dalia Dassa Kaye takes impartiality to the extreme, refusing in the face of mounting evidence to make even the most modest of claims about the causes of America’s animosity toward the Islamic Republic.
For Afshin Matin-Asgari, a US academic from the Iranian diaspora, the poor relations are a product of US refusal to accept Iranian autonomy. Before the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Iran was a client state whose primary purpose, from the US perspective, was as a market for arms and as a bulwark against the Soviets in the Persian Gulf.
Matin-Asgari’s focus on US imperialism frees him from idealizing US-Iran relations prior to the revolution. His focus on the revolution itself is perhaps unsurprising given that he was among the leftist students studying in the United States who returned to participate in the events of 1978–79.
After the Shah fled Iran in January 1979, he moved to the West. As the months went by, his hopes of regaining his throne diminished and his lymphatic cancer spread; he wearily drifted from Cairo to Rabat to Paradise Island in the Bahamas, and finally to Cuernavaca. With few friends left, the Shah still had his banker, David Rockefeller, who pulled the requisite strings to land him in Mexico.
The Shah also had Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger on his side. The latter lobbied the Carter administration to admit him into the United States for…
Auteur: Arron Reza Merat
