US relations with Iran were dictated in the years following the Second World War by the desire for access to oil. The Shah granted British Petroleum access to Iranian oil fields and, in return for development aid, remained committed to the western nations. With the election of Mohammed Mossadeq as the new prime minister and the Shah’s exile in 1951, however, this changed as the country’s oil wells and refineries were immediately nationalized. President Eisenhower, claiming that the new leader was a puppet of the communists, decided to intervene and sent in CIA operatives to foment demonstrations against Mossadeq, leading to his resignation in 1953.

The Shah returned and, quickly making Iran the largest recipient of American aid outside NATO, he bolstered his secret police and armed forces. All this left a legacy of strong anti-American sentiment, which, following the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini, resulted in the invasion of the US Embassy in Teheran and the taking of sixty American hostages. President Carter’s failure to gain the hostages’ release, coupled with the media demonization of Iranian Islamic fundamentalism, was chronicled every evening on ABC’s Nïghtline, and became a key reason for his loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 elections.

The fact that the hostages were released to coincide with Reagan’s inauguration led to the suggestion that a deal had been made between Republican Party leaders and the Khomeini government. Such connections were then further developed in the Iran-Contra affair, in which Attorney-General Edwin Meese revealed that arms had been sold to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages in Lebanon and that profits from these sales had been sent to contra rebels in Nicaragua in violation of congressional legislation forbidding such aid. This scandal, breaking in 1986, was the most serious of the Reagan presidency undermining the US foreign policy of refusing to negotiate with terrorists, though, as Oliver North took the fall, it did not come close to dislodging the “teflon president.” Relations with Iran have been normalized with the emergence of Iraq, Iran’s enemy throughout the 1980s, as the main threat to stability in the region.