In November 1976, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the king of Iran, wrote a sternly worded letter to President Ford rejecting a White House plea to cap the high oil prices that fueled Iranian prosperity but that threatened American prosperity. “Nothing could provoke more reaction from us,” declared the Shah, “than this threatening note from certain circles and their paternalistic attitude.”1
Oil prices were the most contentious but not the only source of tension between the two allies, as Alvandi makes clear in his enlightening new book, which offers a timely revisionist approach to one of the most misunderstood bilateral relationship of modern times. In his lifetime and in the decades since, the public image of the shah has been that of an American “puppet” or “stooge,” a brutally effective caricature that sharply influenced scholarly discussion of U.S.–Iran relations for at least the past generation. Not that the three principals...