This chapter documents the final collapse of detente, focusing in particular on events in the Middle East, where the Iranian Revolution, and then the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, reshaped the regional order. The chapter argues that the superpowers' differing perceptions of what constituted their legitimate interests led to conflicts in the third world. Linkage, the belief that improved Soviet–American relations would dissuade the Soviets from exporting revolution to the third world, failed as it did not align with the Soviet self-perception as America's equal. The decline of detente is traceable to multiple factors, including the Soviet appetite for maintaining a third world clientele and the twists and turns of US domestic politics. By the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, detente was already on the rocks and the Soviet–American relationship continued to worsen. The vision, once entertained by the now-senile Brezhnev, of a world co-managed by the United States and USSR as equals faded, leaving in its wake an uncertain and hostile environment.

This chapter addresses the limitations potentially placed on the success of revolutions by “human nature” - which in psychological terms are the hard-wired characteristics that limit change in behavior. It is argued that in the long term, even behaviors that we conceptualize as hardwired at present tend to change (particularly through changes in the environment). The avowed goals of the French, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, and Iranian revolutions are examined, and it is concluded that none of these revolutions achieved their goals. Despite failure, the regimes that survive in China, Cuba, and Iran continue to use the rhetoric of revolution. Four ways in which human nature seems to doom revolutions are considered: extremists come to power; an “ends justify the means” approach is adopted and corruption results; the style of leader–follower relations persist after revolutions, with the result that one dictatorship replaces another; and revolutionaries typically fail to set up the necessary conditions to achieve the behavioral changes necessary to reach their revolutionary goals (such as collectivization).

This book brings together diplomatic and social history to narrate the history of US–Iranian relations. It argues that cultural openness and cooperation brought benefits not only to America and Iran, but the region more generally. The rift in US–Iranian relations had to do with more than the Mosaddeq coup or the dramatic shift in Iranian politics after 1979. Iran was confronted with competing nationalisms along its borders that forced Iran to adopt a defensive posture. Finally, America and Iran operated on both elite and non-elite networks that showed the ways in which social divisions affected diplomacy.

Chapter 1 focuses on framing research with strong grounding in theory and previous scholarship. This chapter introduces the book’s methodology and sources, as well as providing an overview of the book’s chapters and main arguments. This work claims two central arguments: first, the modern nation-state of Iran was established in 1979 with the revolution that instilled an indigenous and independent nationalism and eradicated all vestiges of foreign power, including the shah; second, the national identity created by the people during the decades preceding the revolution was the most resonant and inclusive because it infused the Shiite symbols ignored by the Pahlavi dynasty, and overused by the Islamic Republic, into populist elements of Iranian society. Despite the political turmoil of the Islamic Republic, that fusion and plurality endure. While the various chapters explore their own specific themes, these ideas run as threads throughout the work to tie the pieces together.

Chapter 3 shifts focus to the postrevolutionary era and how the revolutionary ideology and the national identity it inspired were used and misused by the new Islamic Republic. It also looks at how the Iranian people continued to appropriate and challenge the state’s ideology and representation. The chapter discusses the significance of the Iran–Iraq war (1980-88) in the early years after the revolution and how the war shaped contemporary Iran. While the Pahlavi’s maintained a discourse of monarchical ancient Iran and Persian supremacy, the new Islamic Republic made use of the Karbala paradigm and the martyrdom of Imam Hossein, which played especially well into the context of war and attack from an external force. Though the history and state remained the same, the opposing narratives offered by the old and new rulers speak to the nature of constructed national identities. In both cases, nationalism and Islamism have been crucial to their resistance movements. The Islamic Republic was brought to power by a revolution, whose opposition to the shah was embedded in anti-imperialist and Islamist rhetoric. Echoing Hamid Dabashi’s claim that Shiites must be perpetually engaged in resistance to oppression, the state depicts itself as continuously revolutionary and supports regional movements with analogous rhetoric.

Chapter 2 provides historical background of Pahlavi monarchy and its nation-state project. To be a modern nation-state required a cohesive national identity and complimenting narrative. The significance of that account was not lost on the shah, who tried to formulate an uninterrupted history of Iranian dominion. Chapter 2 relies heavily on a close reading of the words of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to shed light on the shah’s rationale for upholding this narrative. The shah understood that Iran could not forge its independence and image as a modern nation-state without freedom from foreign control. According to the shah, it was his father who "created" the modern Iranian state and saved Iran from the ineptness of its previous dynasty. This chapter also challenges the shah’s account and explores how his subjects saw him as foreign and as a symbol of Iran’s capitulation to external powers. The shah’s failed nationalism left space for his opposition to produce an alternative narrative that captured the imagination of the masses of Iranian people. Chapter 2 lays the foundation for the sections that follow by presenting not only the newly constructed image of Iranian nationalism, but also why it was needed in order to advance the cause of independence.

Through this chapter light is shed on the different aspects of the Iranian Kurdish movement during the turbulence of the period from 1979 to the 1980s. The Islamic regime’s hostile attitude towards the non-Persian and non-Shiite people and communities’ claim of autonomy and decentralisation of power in Iran is dealt with as an explanation for violent clashes between regime forces and forces of nationalist groups in Iran’s peripheral regions. It is highlighted that the changing regimes in Tehran have, throughout the modern history of the country, failed to provide the non-Persian national communities with their political and cultural rights. In addition, the chapter concentrates on the relations in the twentieth century between Iran’s changing regimes and the non-Persian communities, showing that this relation contains several examples of the regime’s brutal attacks on the country’s Azeris, Kurds, Baluchis, Turkemens and Arabs. In this chapter I argue that a mutually mistrusting relationship between the sovereign and these mentioned non-Persian national groups has shaped Iran’s modern history of citizenship.

Through this chapter light is shed on the different aspects of the Iranian Kurdish movement during the turbulence of the period from 1979 to the 1980s. The Islamic regime’s hostile attitude towards the non-Persian and non-Shiite people and communities’ claim of autonomy and decentralisation of power in Iran is dealt with as an explanation for violent clashes between regime forces and forces of nationalist groups in Iran’s peripheral regions. It is highlighted that the changing regimes in Tehran have, throughout the modern history of the country, failed to provide the non-Persian national communities with their political and cultural rights. In addition, the chapter concentrates on the relations in the twentieth century between Iran’s changing regimes and the non-Persian communities, showing that this relation contains several examples of the regime’s brutal attacks on the country’s Azeris, Kurds, Baluchis, Turkemens and Arabs. In this chapter I argue that a mutually mistrusting relationship between the sovereign and these mentioned non-Persian national groups has shaped Iran’s modern history of citizenship.

Despite promises to the contrary, Jimmy Carter largely continues the same policy toward Iran and the authoritarian Shah as in years past. However, with the outbreak of large protests just weeks after his visit to Tehran at the end of 1977, US policymakers find themselves poorly informed and positioned to react to the changing situation in Iran. The documents in this chapter map the process of Washington’s initial misjudgment of the near future for its ally through the slow realization that the Shah is not going to see out the year, let alone the decade. In his place rises a new force, utterly unfamiliar to the White House, and led by an enigmatic figure, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose fiery rhetoric and anachronistic beliefs leave Carter and his advisors scrambling for a response. After the US agrees to take in the ailing Shah for medical treatment, students acting in Khomeini’s name storm the US Embassy in Tehran and forever alter the world's perception of the nascent Islamic Republic. The chapter ends by documenting the scramble in the White House to free the American hostages and Carter handing over the presidency to Ronald Reagan as the hostages finally return home.

This chapter discusses how the volume charts the 1979 Iranian Revolution by examining the complex interplay of space and time that made the revolution possible and conceptions of the global contested. What unites the multidisciplinary collection of authors is that they all treat the global, national, regional, or local as neither natural, preexisting, nor opposed to one another; instead, they assume that these scales are coproduced in specific historical contexts. Globalizing the Iranian Revolution in this manner is an enterprise in recovering the histories of the revolution non-teleologically and to think of global history as multidirectional and not emanating from a single epicenter or from “the global” to “the local.” Specifically, Global 1979 presents five discrete propositions: (1) geographic and archival margins are powerful means to decenter political struggles; (2) global guerrilla tactics politicized space before and after the revolution; (3) tracing genealogies allows us to think simultaneously, rather than linearly about causation; (4) the circulation of expertise left divisive imprints on society; (5) part of what gave the revolution meaning was imagining the world. Collectively and individually, the chapters disrupt familiar stories and interrupt hackneyed historical sequences by making us attuned to configurations of space and time obfuscated by a penchant to explain outcomes, assign responsibility, and second-guess decisions.

Historical analyses tend to agree that the Iranian Revolution was an overwhelmingly “urban” revolution. But how did the revolutionaries themselves see “the urban,” that is, the material, social, and ideological phenomena entangled with the processes of urbanization?In this chapter, the author explores how the arguably most prominent revolutionary Iranian socialist organization prior to the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Organization of the Iranian People’s Fadâ‘i Guerrillas, engaged “the urban.” The author examines a range of Fadâ‘i materials from the end of the 1960s to the end of the 1970s that reflect the organization’s theory and action through four analytical points related to “the urban,” namely, (1) as a central feature of the organization’s historical context and profile; (2) as elements in the organization’s revolutionary theory and strategy; (3) as a setting and resource for its armed action; and (4) as a site for detection of revolutionary potential. The author contend that the urban was used by the guerrillas to work through the global, that is, the universalistic pretentions of Marxist ideology and of Third Worldist revolutionary theory, toward an Iran-specific praxis. “The urban” became an abstract and concrete link, the author argues, connecting a transnational space of ideas to a particular, localized struggle for national liberation and thus, in short, to anchor theory in practice.

This chapter reconstructs rumors and demonstrations in 1968 around the death of Gholamreza Takhti, Iran's beloved gold-winning wrestling champion, recentering them in the history of the 1979 revolution and the global 1960s. The account of the demonstrations provided here explains a mobilization tactic used to great effect in the lead up to the 1979 Iranian Revolution: the staging of protests on the fortieth day of mourning. Locating this tactic in 1968, at a moment of global protest, and before ideological disputes between leftists and Islamists congealed in Iran, casts a spotlight on the indeterminate quality of the revolution as a lived event. The authors argue that discussions of “global 1968,” and approaches to global history more broadly construed, must account both for the local specificity and the global echoes signaled by events like the Takhti demonstrations.