Axis of Empire: The Coup, the Shah, and the War Against Iranian Sovereignty

When the Smiling Missionary Opens the Door

Every empire likes to invent for itself an innocent childhood. It wants us to believe that before the gunboats, before the oil men, before the coup plotters and sanctions clerks and Pentagon strategists, there was a tender season of goodwill. Just a few schoolbooks, a few doctors, a few pious travelers with Bibles in their bags and compassion in their hearts. Afshin Matin-Asgari begins by taking a hammer to that fairy tale. The first great strength of Axis of Empire is that it refuses the old bedtime story that relations between Iran and the United States began under a lucky star and only later fell apart because of misunderstanding, mistrust, or the bad manners of politicians. No. The rot was there from the beginning, even if it did not yet wear a military uniform. What we see in this opening movement of the book is not a lost age of friendship, but an early encounter structured by inequality, Orientalist curiosity, Protestant paternalism, commercial appetite, and the self-flattering mythology of a rising white republic that wished to appear morally superior to the old European empires even while preparing to join their club.

The cast of characters in this first phase is revealing. Before Washington became the Shah’s banker, jailer, and arms dealer, the Americans most visible in Iran were missionaries, educators, and scholars. Liberal memory loves this chapter because it seems softer, cleaner, less soaked in blood than what came later. Compared with the British and Russian empires, the Americans could pose as distant and disinterested. And here Matin-Asgari is sharp: that comparison itself did a great deal of ideological work. Because Britain and Russia were already trampling Iran in the open, the Americans could arrive looking modest, almost humble, as if modesty were not sometimes just empire waiting its turn. The missionaries did not conquer territory. They did something more subtle. They entered social life through schools, clinics, printing presses, and moral instruction. They failed at large-scale evangelism, but failure in one register became adaptation in another. Since Iranian Muslims and Christians were not eager to abandon their faith for Protestantism, the missionaries reoriented themselves toward education, medicine, and what they considered uplift. In other words, they learned to translate civilizational arrogance into useful services. That made them more effective, not less.

Matin-Asgari handles this contradiction with real care. He does not flatten every missionary into a cartoon villain, nor does he let them walk away draped in halos. Some of these figures were clearly changed by Iran. Some developed more complicated views of Islam than the crude anti-Muslim prejudices they carried from the United States. Some discovered that Iranian intellectual and religious life was far sturdier than the smug certainties of Protestant America had prepared them to expect. Yet the larger pattern remains. They arrived from a society already saturated with the conceit that it was a providential civilization, chosen to instruct the backward and discipline the benighted. Even when the missionary learned respect, the structure of the mission remained unequal. The Iranian was still cast as the object to be studied, improved, healed, translated, and, if possible, remade. The language of service softened domination without abolishing its premise. The civilizing mission, whether wrapped in a British flag or an American Bible, still assumes that history belongs to the Westerner and that the rest of humanity must be ushered toward it like late students entering class after the bell.

This is where the chapter does more than correct a historical detail. It exposes a mechanism of empire. The United States, still lacking the raw geopolitical weight it would later wield, first appeared in Iran not mainly through state power but through social and cultural penetration. Missionaries printed books, opened schools, founded hospitals, and inserted themselves into the fabric of minority Christian communities, especially in the northwest. Their project shifted from conversion to institution building, and that shift mattered. It allowed Americans to accumulate moral capital. They could be remembered not as occupiers but as helpers. Yet in a world already divided by colonial force, even “help” comes stamped with ideology. Modern schooling was not neutral. Medical care was not neutral. Print culture was not neutral. These institutions carried assumptions about progress, religion, gender, discipline, and civilization. They also helped establish a durable Iranian impression that Americans were somehow different from the Europeans: less grasping, less cynical, less imperial. History would later show that this difference was not one of essence, only of timing, method, and position.

The book is especially good when it shows how this myth of American innocence was built not only by what Americans did, but by what they seemed not to do. Since the United States had not yet imposed the kind of direct domination exercised by Britain and Russia, it could benefit from the contrast. Samuel Green Wheeler Benjamin, the first American envoy, appears here as a fitting representative of this posture. He observed Iran with the mixture of curiosity, condescension, admiration, and strategic calculation typical of the better-spoken imperial mind. He could appreciate aspects of Iranian life and still see the country as a field for American opportunity. That is the old trick of bourgeois cosmopolitanism: it learns enough about other peoples to trade with them, write about them, and eventually rule them more efficiently. Benjamin understood that the United States could present itself as a faraway power with no colonial ambitions, a benevolent alternative to the decaying predators of Europe. It was a marvelous sales pitch. History, unfortunately for the salesmen, would later send the invoice.

What Matin-Asgari quietly demolishes here is the notion that imperialism begins only when Marines land or intelligence agencies get busy bribing thugs in the street. Imperialism has a prehistory. It prepares the ground culturally, morally, intellectually. It studies before it strikes. It flatters before it commands. It establishes circuits of familiarity, dependency, prestige, and desire. The American presence in nineteenth-century Iran was still thin, still uneven, still mediated more through individuals and religious networks than through the full machinery of state power. But that does not make it politically innocent. It only means the relationship had not yet matured into the harder form it would later assume. A seed is not yet a tree, but it already contains the logic of its growth. The missionary school and the diplomatic memoir were not the coup of 1953. They were part of the long apprenticeship of empire that made later domination easier to rationalize, easier to recognize as normal, and easier for some to misremember as benevolence gone astray.

The chapter also makes an important point that any serious anti-imperialist review must hold onto with both hands: the myth of auspicious beginnings survives because it answers emotional and ideological needs on both sides of the imperial divide. For American liberalism, it offers a usable past, a way to imagine the United States as essentially well-meaning and only occasionally misled. For sections of Iranian memory, especially in periods of intense British and Russian pressure, it preserves the image of a Western power that was not yet openly predatory. But history is not a therapy session for wounded national mythologies. It is a battlefield of material forces. When the Constitutional Revolution erupted in the early twentieth century and Iran faced foreign intervention, Washington did not stand with Iranian sovereignty against Anglo-Russian aggression. It held back. And later, when trade and oil concessions came into view, American interests showed themselves perfectly capable of behaving like interests. That is the point. The United States did not betray some original innocence. It grew into the role for which its history had already prepared it.

There is a deeper lesson here too, and Matin-Asgari’s opening chapter invites it even when he does not always pound the table over it. The American republic was never some anti-colonial exception floating above the dirty history of empire. It was born of settler conquest, territorial expansion, racial slavery, and a providential political theology that dressed domination in the language of liberty. A society built that way does not encounter Asia, the Middle East, or Africa with clean hands. It arrives already ideologically armed. So when American missionaries and envoys entered Iran, they did not bring a blank slate. They carried the accumulated worldview of a white settler power learning to think globally. Their relative weakness in the nineteenth century made their conduct appear gentler than that of stronger empires, but weakness is not virtue. A wolf cub is not a lamb because it has not yet grown its teeth.

That is why this opening chapter matters so much. It does not merely set the stage. It teaches the reader how to read the rest of the book. Do not look for tragedy in the collapse of a noble friendship. Look instead for continuity in the changing forms of power. Do not confuse softer methods with softer aims. Do not let the missionary’s medicine bag distract you from the civilizational program in which it traveled. And above all, do not accept the liberal superstition that empire begins only when it becomes impossible to deny. In these early American encounters with Iran, Matin-Asgari shows us empire in embryo: curious, moralizing, commercially alert, strategically patient, and eager to be loved while it learns the terrain. That is how the smiling missionary opens the door. Later, others walk through it carrying contracts, rifles, and plans for the world.

When Oil Put Iran on Empire’s Map

The soft-footed Americans of the earlier period—the missionaries, schoolmen, minor envoys, and moral lecturers—belonged to a moment when the United States had interest in Iran but not yet the power or necessity to seize hold of its future. That condition could not survive the twentieth century. Industrial capitalism was maturing into a far more voracious beast, and the age of oil gave the great powers a new appetite and a new map. Afshin Matin-Asgari shows, with steady clarity, that Iran did not drift naturally into the center of American foreign policy because Washington suddenly discovered Persian poetry or developed a refined concern for Iranian self-government. Iran entered the hard gaze of U.S. strategy because modern empire runs on fuel, because world war rearranged the geography of power, and because the Cold War taught American elites to interpret every assertion of sovereignty in the Global South as either useful to empire or dangerous to it. Once those conditions converged, Iran ceased to be a place Americans visited. It became a place they intended to shape.

The decisive transition began during the Second World War. In 1941, British and Soviet forces occupied Iran, claiming military necessity and the need to secure supply lines while removing Reza Shah, whose perceived proximity to Germany made the Allied powers uneasy. Here one sees again the standard law of empire: the sovereignty of weaker nations is respected right up until it becomes inconvenient. Iran was converted into the so-called Persian Corridor, a strategic artery through which military supplies moved toward the Soviet front. American personnel entered this corridor not as passing spectators but as logistical managers, technicians, transport officials, and military administrators. The country became a bridge in a much larger war machine. This mattered because war has a way of introducing imperial powers to territories in the most practical language possible. Before diplomats write doctrine, quartermasters measure roads. Before strategists write speeches about stability, supply officers learn which rail lines matter. In this sense, the wartime presence of the United States in Iran was not yet full domination, but it was something more substantial than cultural contact. Washington had begun to encounter Iran through the material grammar of military necessity.

And once the war ended, necessity did not retreat. It deepened. The Cold War turned geography into ideology. Iran now stood on the southern edge of the Soviet Union, bordering a socialist rival that American planners had already elevated into the organizing obsession of postwar policy. But it was not only geography that fixed Iran in Washington’s imagination. Beneath Iranian soil and across the wider region lay petroleum, the black sacrament of twentieth-century capitalism. Oil moved tanks, aircraft, factories, shipping fleets, and the entire industrial metabolism of empire. A system built on endless accumulation must secure the materials of its own motion, and it must do so everywhere and at all times, while speaking grandly of peace, freedom, and international order. The bourgeoisie has always possessed a marvelous talent for dressing theft in abstractions. What was at stake in Iran was not some sentimental concern for democracy. It was control over a strategically positioned state in a region whose resources had become indispensable to the world system dominated by the West.

Matin-Asgari’s treatment of this period is especially effective because he does not let Cold War anti-communism float above the material facts. He shows how it worked as a political language through which imperial priorities were translated into moral necessity. That language became crucial when Mohammad Mosaddegh entered the scene. Mosaddegh was no caricature from American propaganda. He was not a Soviet puppet lurking behind constitutional procedure. He was an Iranian nationalist committed to parliamentary politics, legal sovereignty, and the principle that Iran ought to control its own wealth. His great crime, from the standpoint of empire, was therefore both simple and unforgivable: he treated Iranian oil as if it belonged to Iran. The nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951 was not merely an economic reform. It was a political rupture. It announced that the old imperial arrangement—where foreign capital extracted extraordinary value from Iranian resources while returning crumbs and lectures—could no longer be taken for granted.

Britain reacted like a thief outraged at the theft of stolen property. Its fury was immediate and instructive. London imposed sanctions, organized a global boycott of Iranian oil, and worked tirelessly to isolate Mosaddegh. The British state, the oil company, and the imperial press all moved in concert, as ruling-class institutions tend to do when profit begins masquerading as civilization in danger. Here the book lays bare one of the oldest habits of empire: when colonized or semi-colonized peoples demand control over their own land and labor, the imperial center suddenly discovers a crisis of legality. Contracts signed under domination become sacred. Plunder becomes order. Resistance becomes irresponsibility. That pattern did not begin in Iran, and it did not end there, but Iran offers a particularly clean example of the thing. Mosaddegh was intolerable not because he had abolished liberal procedure, but because he used legal-national means to interrupt imperial accumulation.

The United States, in the early stages of the oil nationalization crisis, hesitated. That hesitation has sometimes been misread as evidence of principle. Matin-Asgari is far too careful a historian for such childish sentiment. Washington’s uncertainty reflected tactical debate, not moral opposition to imperial interference. Some American officials feared that British intransigence would destabilize Iran and open political space for the Tudeh Party or other forces beyond Western control. Others believed a negotiated settlement might preserve both Western access and Iranian stability. But the deeper structure of American power was already leaning in a different direction. As Cold War doctrine hardened, nationalism in the Third World was increasingly read not on its own terms, but through the paranoid optic of containment. In this vision, every strike against foreign capital risked becoming a gateway to communism; every demand for sovereignty carried the odor of subversion. The United States did not need Mosaddegh to be a communist. It only needed him to disrupt an imperial order at a moment when that order was being welded to anti-Soviet strategy.

By 1953, the liberal mask had slipped. Working with British intelligence, the CIA organized the overthrow of Mosaddegh in what became one of the signature operations of modern covert empire. This was not a spontaneous uprising of the Iranian masses discovering overnight that sovereignty had gone too far. It was a managed political assault involving bribery, propaganda, manipulation of press networks, cultivation of military figures, and orchestration of street mobilization. The whole filthy business was a fine lesson in bourgeois democracy as practiced abroad: praise constitutionalism when it produces compliant governments; destroy it when it threatens capital and strategy. Newspapers were fed lies. Politicians were bought. Crowds were maneuvered. Officers were positioned. The Shah, who had neither the courage of a revolutionary nor the dignity of a true nationalist, was restored under imperial sponsorship. And then, as always, the operation was narrated not as domination but as rescue. The arsonist wrote himself into history as the fire brigade.

This is the real hinge in the story Matin-Asgari is telling. Before 1953, the United States had influence in Iran, growing interest in Iran, and strategic designs on Iran. After 1953, it had a decisive hand in constructing the political order of Iran. The coup did not simply topple a prime minister. It reorganized the relationship between the Iranian state and American power. Iran was now to function as a disciplined regional ally inside the architecture of U.S. empire. The monarchy would be strengthened, the military would be modernized, the security apparatus would deepen, and Iranian development would be steered along lines compatible with Western capital and Western geopolitical priorities. Here the earlier history of cultural penetration gives way fully to the age of the client state. The teacher has handed the file to the spy. The missionary has yielded the stage to the covert operator. The smiling language of friendship has been translated into the harder prose of strategic control.

For the Iranian masses, though, the coup lodged itself in popular memory as something far larger than a government change. It exposed a truth that generations would carry forward: foreign domination in the modern age rarely announces itself in the old colonial costume. Sometimes it comes wrapped in the language of anti-communism. Sometimes it speaks the idiom of modernization and reform. Sometimes it arrives through embassies, development experts, newspapers, and generals rather than through formal annexation. But the substance remains. A people attempted to assert collective control over their wealth and future, and the imperial powers answered with sabotage and regime change. That memory would not disappear, no matter how many weapons Washington shipped, how many planners it sent, or how much money it poured into the monarchy. Beneath the coming alliance between the Shah and the United States lay the unresolved fact that the Iranian nation had been taught, in the clearest possible terms, what American friendship meant when material interests were at stake.

What makes this part of the book especially powerful is that it reveals continuity beneath change. The United States did not suddenly become imperial in Iran in 1953, as though innocence had been corrupted by circumstance. Rather, the forms of engagement matured along with the requirements of empire. In the earlier period, cultural institutions helped establish familiarity, prestige, and ideological access. In the wartime and Cold War period, those softer inheritances gave way to strategic management and finally to direct political intervention. This is not a story of national character being betrayed. It is a story of a settler-capitalist republic rising into its proper imperial scale. Once oil, geography, and global rivalry made Iran indispensable, American policy behaved exactly as the long history of capitalist empire would lead us to expect. The difference was not moral but developmental. The wolf had grown.

So this segment closes not with diplomatic misunderstanding but with imperial clarity. Iran has now been placed firmly on empire’s map. Oil has made it precious, war has made it legible, and the Cold War has made its independence intolerable when exercised outside Western command. Matin-Asgari shows this transformation with admirable discipline. The country that once occupied the margins of American attention has become a strategic prize, and the relationship has crossed a threshold from contact to control. The old myth of benign beginnings cannot survive this chapter any more than it survived the first. By the time Mosaddegh falls, the smiling republic has shown its teeth. The classroom has given way to the operations room. And the long modern struggle between Iranian sovereignty and U.S. imperial power has truly begun.

How Empire Built Itself a Throne in Tehran

After the coup, the work changed its costume. The dirty business of overthrow had been done. Mosaddegh was gone, the Shah was back, and Washington could now move from sabotage to construction. This is one of the most important transitions in Axis of Empire, and Afshin Matin-Asgari handles it with steady force. He makes clear that 1953 was not simply an event. It was the opening of a whole new political era in which the United States did not merely interfere in Iranian affairs from time to time, but helped design the very structure through which Iran would be governed. The earlier American presence had entered through schools, missions, and polite official contact. The coup introduced covert power. But what followed the coup was something larger and more durable: the fabrication of a client state, disciplined from above, armed from abroad, and presented to the world as progress.

The Shah was the face of this new order, but faces can mislead. Monarchs are often treated as if they alone explain the regimes they sit atop, as though history were driven by the hairstyle of the sovereign. Matin-Asgari does not indulge that kind of foolishness. He shows instead that the monarchy after 1953 functioned inside a wider imperial system. Washington did not simply “support” the Shah in some vague diplomatic sense. It helped consolidate the institutions that would make his rule effective. Money flowed in. Military aid expanded. American advisors worked their way into the machinery of the state. Training programs linked the Iranian officer corps ever more tightly to U.S. doctrine. Development specialists, economists, administrators, and technical experts circulated through Iran bearing blueprints for modernization, which is to say blueprints for a society reorganized in forms legible and useful to Western capital and Western strategy. The language was uplifting. The substance was discipline.

This is where the book begins to expose one of the great lies of modern imperialism. The old colonial powers used to dominate with greater theatrical honesty. They sent governors, raised flags, and called whole nations protectorates. The United States, more refined in its hypocrisy, preferred a different style. It spoke of partnership, assistance, development, mutual security, and reform. It loved local rulers so long as they ruled locally on behalf of global power. In Iran, this meant building up a state strong enough to crush internal opposition and stable enough to guarantee alignment with the West. The Shah’s throne did not rest only on Iranian soil. It rested on an international foundation of arms deals, intelligence cooperation, aid packages, elite integration, and Cold War doctrine. He looked like a national ruler. Increasingly, he functioned like the local manager of a broader imperial arrangement.

Military power was central to this arrangement. The post-coup state was fortified with American assistance because Iran, from Washington’s perspective, was far too important to be left politically loose. It bordered the Soviet Union. It sat inside the oil-rich geography of the Middle East. It could serve as an anchor in the anti-communist chain Washington was trying to weld across the region. So the Iranian armed forces were enlarged, modernized, trained, and equipped in close connection with the United States. One sees here the ordinary logic of empire: weapons are sold as security, but security really means the security of an order favorable to capital and geostrategy. The peasant, the worker, the dissident student, the nationalist intellectual—none of them experienced this militarization as some abstract question of balance-of-power theory. They experienced it as the strengthening of a state that could now police society more thoroughly in the name of modern nationhood.

Iran’s incorporation into Cold War alliance structures deepened the pattern. Through the Baghdad Pact and later CENTO, the country was tied into a regional system advertised as defensive cooperation against Soviet expansion. But such pacts, as history teaches us again and again, are never just about defense. They are about alignment. They draw states into a hierarchy of priorities defined by stronger powers. They restructure national policy around external strategic goals and reward compliant ruling classes for obedience. Iran’s place in these arrangements was not the mark of some sovereign equal sitting at the imperial table. It was the mark of a strategically useful subordinate whose geography and oil wealth made him too valuable to neglect. The menu, needless to say, was still written elsewhere.

Yet guns and treaties alone cannot sustain a client state. Empire also requires ideology, administration, and the everyday manufacture of consent—or, when consent proves insufficient, the efficient manufacture of fear. This is where Matin-Asgari’s analysis grows especially sharp. He traces how the post-coup order was built not only through military integration but through the broader modernization project promoted by the Shah and encouraged by Washington. American universities established ties with Iranian institutions. Technocrats and planners promoted development schemes modeled on Western assumptions. Economic policy was increasingly shaped by imported conceptions of growth, efficiency, and administrative rationality. There was much talk of progress. There is always much talk of progress when a society is being reorganized from above by men who dine well while describing disruption as a necessary stage of national advancement. Modernization, in this sense, was not a neutral path toward some universal future. It was a political-economic program: centralize the state, accelerate capitalist development, widen elite integration with the West, weaken autonomous mass politics, and render the country more functional within the American-led order.

But every such project drags contradictions behind it like chains clanking over stone. The Shah’s Iran developed rapidly in certain respects, yes. Roads expanded, bureaucracies thickened, educational institutions multiplied, urban centers grew, and the state acquired new capacities. To the foreign observer with dollar signs in his pupils and anti-communism in his bloodstream, this looked like success. Here, he could say, was a modernizing ally moving forward under wise leadership. What these observers rarely paused to ask was forward for whom, under whose control, and at what social cost. Development inside capitalism is never a simple arithmetic of more factories plus more roads equals more justice. It rearranges class relations. It dislocates old communities. It creates new expectations while denying the political channels through which those expectations might be expressed. It enriches some strata, crushes others, and often leaves the masses staring at billboards of modernity while being denied power over the world being remade around them.

The repression that underwrote this entire order was not accidental. It was constitutive. SAVAK, the Shah’s notorious security and intelligence apparatus, emerged as one of the iron instruments of the new Iran, built with the assistance of the United States and Israel and tasked with monitoring, infiltrating, terrorizing, and breaking opposition. One does not need to decorate this point with excessive rhetoric. The fact itself is obscene enough. The same imperial bloc that sang hymns to freedom and development helped construct a machinery of surveillance and torture to ensure that Iranian society remained governable in the approved fashion. This is modern bourgeois civilization in one of its purest forms: university exchange programs on one side, interrogation cells on the other; speeches about reform in the daylight, electric wires in the basement by night. The ruling class has always loved enlightenment, provided it is administered with truncheons.

And so the contradictions widened. Rapid economic and social change churned the countryside and the cities alike. Rural populations were drawn into new patterns of displacement and migration. Urban life expanded under unequal conditions. Students, intellectuals, workers, and sections of the middle strata found themselves living inside a society that promised national greatness while withholding democratic participation and national dignity. The monarchy presented itself as the engine of progress, but the more visibly it depended on foreign backing, foreign models, foreign arms, and foreign intelligence, the more this progress appeared compromised at the root. The regime could build institutions. It could not easily build legitimacy. It could command obedience. It could not command historical trust from a population that increasingly understood, however unevenly, that the state ruling over them had been reforged in the aftermath of a foreign-backed coup.

That is one of the deep achievements of Matin-Asgari’s treatment of this era. He shows that the post-1953 order was not merely authoritarian and not merely pro-American. It was structurally dependent. Its internal coherence relied on external support, and that dependence shaped its political character. The Shah could posture as a proud ruler of an ancient civilization, but the very durability of his rule depended upon an imperial relationship that narrowed the space of Iranian sovereignty. His state was modernized, yes, but in a way that tethered its commanding heights ever more tightly to American power. His military was strengthened, but for purposes defined less by popular defense than by regional strategy within the Cold War. His institutions were expanded, but not to deepen democracy. They were expanded to manage transformation without surrendering control. It was modernization with a choke chain.

For the masses, these realities did not necessarily appear first as a fully developed theory of dependency or neocolonialism. People often live contradictions before they name them. They feel humiliation before they draft manifestos about it. They experience repression before they situate it in the world system. But the experience accumulates. Foreign advisors here, military cooperation there, censorship, prisons, inequality, elite arrogance, political suffocation—bit by bit the social meaning of the regime becomes clearer. A state cannot indefinitely claim to embody national advancement while smothering the nation’s political life and subordinating its strategic direction to imperial interests. Such a contradiction can be managed for a time. It cannot be resolved inside the terms of the system itself.

So this part of the story closes with an order that appears strong but is already unstable at the foundation. The empire has built itself a throne in Tehran, but it has built it on social pressure, political exclusion, and wounded sovereignty. From Washington’s perspective, this may have looked like a triumph of postwar strategy: Iran secured, the monarchy disciplined, the Soviet frontier watched, oil protected, regional influence consolidated. From below, however, another process was underway. The client state was generating the very resentments and contradictions that would one day shake it to pieces. That is the cruel dialectic of imperial order. In the effort to build a reliable pillar, empire often manufactures its future crisis. The throne stands, glittering in imported steel and royal pomp. Underneath it, history is already gathering a hammer.

When the Palace Learned That Fear Has Limits

By the late 1970s, the Shah’s regime had reached that dangerous moment common to so many client states: it mistook its own theatrical strength for genuine historical security. The palaces were intact. The army was huge. The police apparatus was feared. Oil wealth flowed through the state in torrents. American weapons, American advisors, and American confidence all stood behind the monarchy like a second skeleton beneath the first. From the vantage point of empire, Iran still looked like one of the great success stories of postwar strategy. Here was the lesson Washington wished the world to study: overthrow a troublesome nationalist, build up a disciplined ruler, pump in money and arms, modernize from above, and call the result stability. Afshin Matin-Asgari, to his credit, refuses to be hypnotized by that spectacle. He shows that beneath the appearance of order, the regime was entering an advanced state of contradiction. It had grown wealthy without becoming legitimate, modern without becoming democratic, powerful without becoming secure, and deeply “national” in its rhetoric while remaining tethered to foreign power in its very structure. That is not a formula for permanence. That is a formula for delayed detonation.

The great strength of this part of Axis of Empire is that it does not treat the revolution as some mystical eruption of irrational fury, the way Western commentary so often does when the masses overturn a regime favored by Washington. The Iranian Revolution did not descend from the heavens like a punishment for modernity. It emerged from the earth of Iranian society itself, from long-maturing contradictions generated by the Shah’s order and intensified by its alliance with imperial power. Workers had their grievances. Students had theirs. Religious networks carried their own forms of opposition. Intellectuals, nationalists, leftists, bazaar merchants, and the urban poor all confronted the regime from different angles and with different political languages. The movement that gathered against the monarchy was therefore not simple. It was broad, uneven, contradictory, and historically alive. But what gave it force was that all these currents were moving, in one form or another, against a state that had made itself intolerable.

One of the crucial contradictions was political suffocation. The Shah’s regime had spent years expanding the means of administration, development, education, and security while narrowing the space for real participation. It wanted a modern population without modern politics. It wanted educated people who would remain obedient, workers who would remain disciplined, intellectuals who would remain decorative, and a public sphere that would make noise only on command. This, as it turns out, is not how societies work. When masses are denied meaningful channels through which to express conflict, those conflicts do not vanish. They deepen. They become subterranean. They accumulate not only anger but memory. By the late 1970s, Iranian society was full of such accumulated memory—of the coup, of SAVAK, of censorship, of inequality, of foreign arrogance, of royal pomp floating above social distress like perfume sprayed over rot.

Economic tensions sharpened the picture. The regime had been enriched by oil, but oil wealth did not harmonize society. It accelerated uneven development, enlarged the state’s ambitions, widened inequality, and raised expectations that the political order could not absorb. Inflation, urban strain, and the social distortions of rapid modernization deepened frustration across classes. A worker did not need to read dependency theory to know that development was not working in his favor. A migrant crowding into the city did not need a seminar on imperialism to feel the violence of dislocation. A student did not need a complete philosophy of liberation to see that the state wanted her disciplined but not heard. People often grasp political truth first through lived contradiction and only later through concept. The Shah’s order was producing such contradictions in abundance.

Then there was the matter of sovereignty, which haunted the entire regime like a ghost it could neither banish nor openly confront. The Shah wrapped himself in nationalist pageantry and visions of Persian greatness, but everyone knew—or increasingly came to know—that his rule had been consolidated in the wake of a foreign-backed coup and sustained through foreign arms, foreign intelligence ties, and foreign strategic priorities. This did not mean every opponent of the monarchy had the same analysis of empire, or even that all of them interpreted dependency in identical terms. But it did mean that the regime carried an incurable wound in its legitimacy. It claimed to stand for Iranian greatness while being inseparable from a history of Iranian humiliation. It claimed to embody national advancement while standing in continuity with the suppression of national control over oil and political life. That contradiction could be managed while fear remained effective. Once fear began to crack, the contradiction became explosive.

Matin-Asgari is especially strong when he shows how repression itself helped produce the revolutionary tempo. SAVAK and the broader machinery of surveillance and coercion had been built to fragment opposition, terrify society, and make organized dissent seem futile. For years, this machinery worked well enough to preserve the system. But repression has limits, and one of those limits is that it cannot forever prevent people from discovering each other in struggle. Once protests began widening, each act of state violence generated new anger, new funerals, new commemorations, and new opportunities for people to assemble. The regime intended terror to isolate. Under certain conditions, terror does the opposite. It socializes grief. It turns mourning into mobilization. It teaches people that if the state will beat and kill regardless, then submission no longer guarantees safety. At that point, the psychology of fear begins to reverse. The palace still has guns, but the street begins to acquire moral momentum—and then organizational momentum—and then history starts to move faster than the rulers can think.

The protests that spread through Iran in this period were therefore not random disturbances but stages in the political awakening of a society confronting the limits of monarchical rule. Demonstrations widened. Strikes expanded. Funeral cycles became cycles of renewed protest. Workers in key sectors, including oil, entered the struggle in ways that struck at the material foundation of the state itself. This is always decisive. A regime can survive students denouncing it for a while. It can survive moral embarrassment. It can even survive periods of international discomfort. But when the labor that sustains the national economy begins to move against the state, the problem changes character. The issue is no longer simply legitimacy in the abstract. It becomes governability in the concrete. The system begins to lose its grip over the social reproduction of its own power.

What also made the revolutionary movement formidable was its breadth. This was not a neat ideological procession marching in textbook formation. Iran was too complex for that, and history is usually too rude to follow the preferences of theorists. Religious currents, left organizations, nationalist forces, students, workers, bazaar networks, professionals, and poor urban masses all entered the anti-Shah struggle in different ways and for different reasons. That very heterogeneity gave the uprising force. The monarchy had succeeded in alienating so many layers of society that opposition became cumulative. Each sector brought its own grievances, idioms, leaders, and aspirations. The result was not ideological unity but political convergence. The Shah’s state had managed the remarkable feat of turning itself into the common enemy of people who did not otherwise agree on the future. One must give him credit of a kind. It takes real counterrevolutionary talent to build such a coalition against oneself.

Washington, for its part, watched the crisis with the confusion typical of imperial power when its local instruments begin to fail. For decades, the Shah had been treated as one of the most secure American assets in the region. He had money, weapons, intelligence services, elite allies, and all the external endorsement a monarch could wish for. The problem is that empires often come to believe their own reports. They listen too long to the rulers they have armed. They interpret society through palace walls, intelligence summaries, and the tranquilizing language of allied elites. By the time American policymakers fully grasped the depth of the crisis, they were confronting the collapse of a whole strategic design, not just the wobbling of one regime. The pillar was splitting. And the more urgently Washington sought solutions, the more obvious it became that the old answers—repression, reform from above, tactical reshuffling—could no longer restore the social authority the monarchy had lost.

The Shah himself drifted through this period with increasing uncertainty, and that uncertainty mattered. Rulers who have long governed through command often become politically clumsy when command ceases to work. Concessions were offered too late, reforms proposed too weakly, force applied too inconsistently to restore fear and too brutally to restore trust. The monarchy had entered its terminal contradiction. It could neither fully liberalize nor fully crush the movement without worsening its own crisis. Once a regime reaches that point, its power may still look immense on paper, but it has already begun to dissolve in practice. Armies do not automatically save thrones. Police files do not automatically restore legitimacy. Oil money does not automatically reverse a social process once it has ripened into open rupture. There comes a moment when the state still exists, but belief in its permanence has evaporated. The Shah’s Iran reached that moment.

When the Shah left Iran in January 1979, it was not merely the departure of an individual ruler. It was the visible exhaustion of an entire political architecture built since 1953. Decades of imperial sponsorship, state modernization, military expansion, ideological theater, and domestic repression had failed to resolve the contradictions they were designed to manage. Into the resulting vacuum surged revolutionary energies that had been gathering for years. Ayatollah Khomeini’s return from exile gave one commanding form to that process, but the ground had already been prepared by mass struggle. The old order did not fall because one man returned. It fell because the structures of monarchy and dependency had lost their capacity to command Iranian society.

For the United States, this was a strategic catastrophe precisely because it revealed the limits of imperial management. An ally once presented as indispensable had become unsustainable. A regime built in the aftermath of a CIA coup had been rejected by a revolutionary uprising whose roots reached deep into the social contradictions of Shah-era Iran. And then, later in 1979, the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran condensed decades of resentment into a single unforgettable symbol. The act carried many layers of meaning, but one of them was unmistakable: the old script of American tutelage in Iran was finished. The “special relationship” stood exposed, not as partnership, but as domination remembered from below.

Matin-Asgari is careful not to flatten the revolution into one single current or one final interpretation, and he is right not to. The revolution contained internal tensions, competing projects, and unresolved struggles that would continue to shape Iran after the fall of the monarchy. But the central political lesson remains sharp. The order built after 1953 collapsed not because modernization failed in some technical sense, nor because Iranian society irrationally rejected progress, nor because Washington simply made a few tactical errors near the end. It collapsed because it was built on repression, inequality, dependency, and wounded sovereignty. It collapsed because empire mistook control for consent and developmental spectacle for legitimacy. It collapsed because fear, in the end, has limits.

So Part V closes where all client-state pageantry eventually risks arriving: with the throne confronting the street and discovering that imported strength cannot forever defeat a people in motion. The Shah’s regime had seemed durable because it possessed every visible instrument of modern power. But history is not governed only by what power possesses. It is governed by what contradictions power generates. The palace believed it had disciplined Iran. In truth, it had prepared Iran to rise. And once the masses crossed the threshold from private resentment to public action, the whole glittering architecture of empire in Tehran began to shake like a chandelier in an earthquake.

When Revolution Refused to Return the Keys

Empires are often arrogant, but they are rarely imaginative. They can conceive of coups, sanctions, invasions, assassinations, blockades, and every other variety of civilized gangsterism. What they cannot easily conceive is that a people may truly decide to leave the arrangement altogether. That was the problem facing Washington after the Shah fell. The Americans had spent decades building a whole political architecture in Iran—money, weapons, intelligence links, elite relationships, military doctrine, development channels, and the ordinary habits of dependency that make imperial rule look like the natural order of things. So when the monarchy collapsed, many in the imperial center assumed the matter was still manageable. Perhaps the palace had failed, but surely the structure remained. Surely some respectable transitional coalition could be assembled. Surely a better-behaved set of Iranian elites could be found. Surely the revolution, once the excitement passed, would learn to be reasonable. Afshin Matin-Asgari shows how thoroughly this expectation misread the depth of the rupture. The revolution in Iran did not merely remove the Shah. It refused to hand back the country in an acceptable form.

This is what makes the period after 1979 so historically decisive. The fall of the monarchy opened not a simple transfer of authority but a fierce struggle over the meaning of the revolution itself. That struggle took place in a society whose political life had long been repressed, whose classes and strata had been violently reshaped by uneven modernization, and whose memory of foreign domination remained raw. The Shah had not left behind a healthy liberal order waiting in reserve. He had left behind a vacuum, a broken state form, and a population in motion. The old institutions had lost legitimacy. The army wavered. The bureaucracy hesitated. Power, for a time, moved into the streets, workplaces, neighborhoods, mosques, universities, and improvised revolutionary committees that sprang up in the turbulence of the moment. That is always a frightening sight to empire: ordinary people discovering, however unevenly, that politics does not have to remain trapped inside the offices of men in suits or uniforms.

Matin-Asgari does well not to reduce this revolutionary opening to a neat textbook diagram. Iran in 1979 was not a single ideological current marching in perfect formation toward a universally agreed future. It was a convergence of forces that had fought the monarchy for overlapping but not identical reasons. Workers had entered the struggle with their own demands and their own experience of exploitation and repression. Students and intellectuals had their criticisms of dependency, dictatorship, and the suffocation of thought. Left organizations pushed more radical visions of social transformation. Nationalists sought a sovereign political order free from foreign command. Religious networks brought immense moral authority, organizational reach, and a language of resistance that resonated deeply across broad sections of society. Bazaar layers, urban poor, professionals, rural migrants, and the old wounded strata of an unevenly modernized society all stood inside this convulsive moment. The revolution was powerful precisely because it was not reducible to one class slogan, one institution, or one social bloc. It was the accumulated rejection of a whole order.

Within that vast and contradictory field, Ayatollah Khomeini emerged as the central political pole. That fact has long puzzled or irritated Western observers who prefer their revolutions to follow approved scripts. They can make some peace with liberal reformers so long as they remain harmless. They can even, on occasion, romanticize radicals once safely dead. But a mass revolution led through religious networks, in defiance of U.S. power, with language rooted in popular moral outrage and anti-imperialist memory—this does not fit well inside the filing cabinets of imperial commentary. Yet history is under no obligation to flatter the categories of empire. Khomeini’s leadership became decisive because the clerical and religious networks around him had social reach, legitimacy, and continuity where many other oppositional forces had been broken, fragmented, or driven underground by decades of state repression. A people denied open political life will often organize through whatever institutions remain capable of carrying collective will. In Iran, those institutions mattered enormously.

Still, one must be precise. To say Khomeini emerged as the dominant leader is not to say the revolution belonged only to clerics, or that its social content can be exhausted by theological description. Matin-Asgari’s account is valuable because it leaves room for the density of the moment. Factories, universities, neighborhoods, and state offices all became terrains of contestation. New organs of power and pressure emerged. Revolutionary energy spilled well beyond the boundaries of official institutions. The question was not merely who would govern, but what kind of order would arise from the ruins of the monarchy and the imperial structure behind it. In moments like this, class struggle, ideological struggle, and national struggle become entangled. The nation seeks to reclaim itself. Different forces then fight to define what that reclaimed nation will be.

For the United States, the central problem was never simply that the Shah had fallen. The central problem was that the anti-imperialist content of the revolution was too clear to ignore. The memory of 1953 hung over everything. Iranian revolutionaries did not experience the United States as a neutral foreign government observing events from a distance. They experienced it as the principal outside power that had helped destroy Iranian sovereignty, entrench the Shah, arm the repressive state, and shape the entire political order now being overthrown. This is what liberal commentary always tries to wash out of the picture. It prefers to treat the post-revolutionary hostility toward Washington as irrational extremism, as some sudden outbreak of anti-American passion detached from history. But peoples do not invent such memory from thin air. They inherit it through concrete wounds. They carry it through prisons, disappearances, torture chambers, and the humiliation of seeing national wealth subordinated to foreign power. The revolution did not create that memory. It activated it.

That is why the U.S. embassy became such a charged symbol. In the polite language of diplomacy, an embassy is just an embassy. In the political memory of a nation subjected to covert operations and imperial supervision, it can signify much more. When revolutionary students seized the embassy in November 1979, the action shocked the world, but it did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from the historical consciousness of a people who knew very well that embassies, intelligence networks, and foreign “advice” had long been woven into the machinery of domination. The students understood the place not simply as a diplomatic site but as a living emblem of the old relationship. One may debate the tactic. One may debate its political consequences. But one cannot honestly debate its historical meaning. It declared, in a language the empire could not miss, that the old guardianship was over. Iran would not quietly return the keys.

Washington reacted with the injured fury characteristic of great powers suddenly confronted with the memory of their own behavior. The same state that had helped engineer the overthrow of Mosaddegh, fortified SAVAK, and underwritten the monarchy now presented itself as the aggrieved defender of law and civilized order. The hypocrisy was magnificent, almost artistic. One could only admire the craftsmanship of the lie. Sanctions, pressure, diplomatic retaliation, and a whole new framework of hostility soon followed. The relationship between Iran and the United States was no longer one of management and patronage. It had become one of open antagonism. And beneath the rhetoric on both sides lay a stubborn reality: a crucial pillar of American power in the Middle East had been shattered and replaced by a state built, in large measure, through a rejection of that very imperial arrangement.

Matin-Asgari is careful not to romanticize the early Islamic Republic as some uncomplicated resolution of the revolutionary process, and he is right not to. Revolutions do not eliminate contradiction; they reorganize it. Internal struggles over constitutional structure, political authority, economic direction, and the place of different revolutionary currents did not disappear after the monarchy fell. They intensified. Competing visions of justice, sovereignty, and governance collided inside the new order. The revolution had unified broad social forces against the Shah, but victory over a common enemy does not automatically produce unity over what comes next. This is a basic law of revolutionary history. The negative moment of overthrow and the positive moment of reconstruction are related, but they are not the same. Different classes, institutions, and ideological tendencies seek to turn the opening in history toward their own project.

External pressure then deepened these contradictions further. The new Iranian state was not allowed the luxury of leisurely internal settlement. It entered the world under siege, mistrusted by the United States, threatened regionally, and soon engulfed in the devastating Iran-Iraq War. That war, backed materially and politically by powers who had little interest in seeing the revolution consolidate on its own terms, placed immense strain on the postrevolutionary process. One cannot understand the shape of the Islamic Republic without understanding that it was forged not in a calm laboratory of national self-determination but in a furnace of pressure, conflict, and encirclement. States born through rupture are often hardened by siege. The empire then points to that hardening as proof of barbarism, conveniently forgetting the hammer in its own hand.

Still, whatever one’s ultimate assessment of the Islamic Republic’s internal contradictions, the broader historical significance remains unmistakable. The revolution had broken the architecture established after 1953. It had removed Iran from the obedient map of American Cold War strategy and replaced clientelism with confrontation. It had shown that even a regime armed to the teeth, drenched in oil money, embedded in Western strategy, and praised endlessly by elite opinion could fall when the masses moved and when anti-imperialist memory fused with social revolt. That lesson traveled far beyond Iran. It told the colonized and semi-colonized world that empire’s arrangements, however polished, are not eternal. They can be ruptured. They can be defied. They can even be made to look ridiculous.

That, finally, is why Part VI matters so much in the movement of this book. It is not merely the chapter after the Shah. It is the chapter in which the whole prior structure of Iran-U.S. relations is tested in reverse. The missionary prelude, the oil struggle, the coup, the client state, the glittering showcase of authoritarian modernization, the revolutionary collapse of the monarchy—all of it leads here, to the moment when the relationship ceases to function on imperial terms. Washington expected adjustment. Iran produced rupture. Washington expected continuity. Iran produced a state that would not behave. Washington expected that revolution, like all troublesome things in the Global South, could eventually be managed back into a familiar pattern. But the revolution refused. It did not merely slam the door. It kept the door shut and told empire, in no uncertain terms, that history had changed hands.

The Empire That Could Not Forgive Defiance

Once Iran slipped out of Washington’s grip, the relationship entered a harsher, more naked stage. The old period of management was over. There would be no more talk of partnership in the old sense, no more pretense that the United States was simply helping guide a friendly monarchy toward modernity. That script had burned with the Shah’s departure. What followed instead was the long imperial punishment of a state that had broken rank. Afshin Matin-Asgari traces this period with the patience of a historian who understands that empire rarely accepts loss with dignity. It broods. It plots. It pressures. It encircles. If it cannot restore direct influence, it works to make independence as painful as possible. That is the larger movement of this final phase. Iran was no longer a client to be managed; it had become an example to be disciplined.

The most immediate and devastating test came with the Iran-Iraq War. In 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, wagering that the revolutionary state was too disorganized, too divided, and too exhausted to defend itself effectively. The wager was not made in a vacuum. Revolutions do not face the world on neutral ground. They face it in a world already arranged by hostile powers. Iran had emerged from monarchy and upheaval into regional isolation, internal reorganization, and open confrontation with the United States. Under such conditions, Iraq’s aggression became imaginable not simply because Saddam was ambitious, but because the broader imperial environment signaled that revolutionary Iran could be bled without much regret. Matin-Asgari does not reduce the war to a puppet show with strings pulled from one capital alone, but the general political truth is plain enough: many powerful states were quite comfortable seeing Iran punished, weakened, and possibly broken.

And so the new republic was thrown into a furnace. The war consumed lives by the hundreds of thousands, devastated infrastructure, militarized society, and transformed the early years of the postrevolutionary period into a brutal struggle for survival. This mattered not only in military terms but in political ones. States born in rupture are often reshaped by siege, and Iran was no exception. The revolution that had overthrown a monarchy now had to defend itself under invasion, isolation, and constant external pressure. Under such conditions, institutions harden. Security becomes central. Centralization deepens. Rhetoric of resistance fuses with the practical necessities of wartime mobilization. Empire later points to that hardening as proof that the rebel state was always severe by nature, conveniently ignoring its own role in creating the siege conditions under which severity becomes politically functional. It is a familiar trick. First help produce the emergency, then condemn the society that reorganizes itself to survive it.

The United States, of course, did not stand innocently to one side wringing its hands over the violence. Washington’s hostility toward revolutionary Iran had already become structural. Whatever tactical shifts appeared at different moments, the underlying orientation remained clear enough: the new Iranian state was to be contained, weakened, and prevented from becoming a durable anti-imperialist force in the region. During the war, Iraq benefited from an international climate that favored its role as a counterweight to Iran. Intelligence assistance, diplomatic cover, arms flows through various channels, and the general indulgence of powerful states all formed part of the environment in which Saddam’s regime operated. Iran, by contrast, was expected to absorb punishment. The message was simple. If you overthrow our man, reject our supervision, and reorganize political life outside our command, you will be made to pay for the decision in blood and isolation.

Yet the war also revealed a limit to imperial expectation. Iran did not collapse. It absorbed terrible blows, yes, but it endured. And endurance itself became politically decisive. A revolutionary state that survives invasion, siege, and external pressure acquires a different historical weight than one that merely declares defiance in speeches. This survival strengthened the internal logic of the Islamic Republic even as it intensified its contradictions. The state emerged scarred, militarized, and more deeply shaped by the institutions and political currents that had proven capable of mobilizing endurance under fire. One cannot understand later Iranian state formation without understanding this crucible. The Iran-Iraq War was not a side episode after the revolution. It was one of the great formative ordeals through which the post-1979 order was consolidated.

At the same time, the confrontation with the United States widened beyond the battlefield. The Persian Gulf became one of the key zones where the new antagonism took on strategic form. American naval power moved more aggressively into the region under the banner of protecting shipping, regional stability, and the free flow of commerce—that old hymnbook of empire, forever sung at gunpoint. But behind the language of order stood the same fundamental issue that had haunted the relationship since 1953, only now reversed. The United States no longer used Iran to stabilize its regional architecture. It now sought to stabilize the region against Iran. The distinction is enormous. It marks the full transformation from client management to containment. And in this new phase, U.S. military presence, Gulf alliances, and coercive pressure all worked to box Iran into a position of strategic constriction.

The downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by the United States in 1988 condensed this whole relationship into one hideous fact. A civilian airliner was destroyed, and 290 people were killed. Such episodes are never merely “incidents,” no matter how briskly official language tries to mop up the blood. They reveal the hierarchy of human value inside imperial strategy. When the empire kills, explanations arrive faster than justice. Technical confusion, battlefield conditions, unfortunate error—the vocabulary of managed regret is always ready. But from the standpoint of those on the receiving end, the political meaning is harder and clearer. Iran saw, once again, that the United States was fully prepared to project lethal force in the region while preserving for itself the moral right to narrate the event. This did not create Iranian distrust of American power. It deepened a distrust already earned.

When the war ended, Iran emerged exhausted but not defeated. That distinction matters. The country had suffered immense devastation, but the state had survived the combined weight of invasion, isolation, and pressure. For those in the imperial camp who had hoped the Islamic Republic might disintegrate under strain, this was an unwelcome outcome. And so the campaign of punishment adjusted its methods. If war had not broken the state, then economic pressure, diplomatic isolation, covert operations, and long-term regional encirclement would have to do the work. This is where sanctions became central. Matin-Asgari shows how the postwar relationship increasingly moved through these instruments of coercion. Sanctions are often described in the antiseptic language of policy, as though they were a kind of legal weather system moving over a country. In truth they are weapons. They target economies, everyday life, development capacity, and social reproduction. They are siege warfare with spreadsheets.

The moral language surrounding sanctions is especially rotten. They are imposed, we are told, in defense of peace, security, law, human rights, or nonproliferation. Empire always discovers a noble sentence to pin over the door of collective punishment. But beneath the rhetoric lies the same strategic function: to make sovereignty expensive, to discipline disobedient states, and to remind others that political independence inside an imperial world system carries heavy material costs. Iran’s economy, financial channels, trade networks, and technological development were all subjected to this long war by other means. The point was not only to alter specific policies. It was to keep the state under permanent strain and to constrain the space in which it could act as an autonomous regional force.

Here we come to the nuclear issue, which Matin-Asgari rightly places inside the longer history rather than treating it as a floating technical dispute. This is crucial. Western commentary loves to isolate Iran’s nuclear program from the broader trajectory of Iran-U.S. relations, as though it descended from outer space and landed in an otherwise normal diplomatic landscape. But history is not so obliging. Iran’s nuclear program cannot be understood outside the revolution, the war, regional insecurity, the legacy of American intervention, Israeli military power, and the broader struggle over who gets to define legitimate sovereignty in the Middle East. The same West that helped nurture Iran’s nuclear development under the Shah later treated that capability as intolerable once Iran ceased to be subordinate. That reversal alone tells the story. Technology is rarely neutral in imperial politics. It is acceptable when controlled by clients, dangerous when held by defiant states, and always interpreted according to the hierarchy of world power rather than any consistent ethical standard.

The negotiations that culminated in the JCPOA briefly suggested that the long confrontation might be managed through a more stable arrangement. Iran accepted limitations and oversight in exchange for relief from sanctions, and for a moment the air cleared enough for the international order to pretend that rules, rather than power, might govern the relationship. But because the deeper issue had never been merely technical enrichment levels or inspection protocols, the arrangement remained fragile. The United States later tore through the agreement, revealing once more that imperial commitments are only as durable as their immediate usefulness. When Washington withdrew and restored sweeping sanctions, it confirmed something Iranians had already learned many times over: the empire reserves for itself the right to set terms, revise terms, and punish others regardless of prior accommodation. In such a world, distrust is not paranoia. It is historical literacy.

Meanwhile, Iran’s regional policy developed in the context of this permanent pressure. Tehran cultivated alliances and relationships across the region not simply out of abstract ideological enthusiasm, but from the logic of survival, deterrence, and anti-imperialist positioning in a hostile environment. The United States and its allies described this as destabilizing expansionism. Iran described it as resistance and strategic necessity. Both descriptions have political content, but only one of them generally gets called “international order” in polite Western company. Empires have a charming habit of naming their own network of bases, fleets, sanctions regimes, and armed allies “stability,” while naming the defensive and counter-hegemonic alignments of others “aggression.” It is one of the oldest linguistic frauds in the business.

What Matin-Asgari’s concluding movement makes clear is that the post-1979 relationship never really escaped the original contradiction at the heart of the book. In one form or another, the struggle has always turned on the same question: who gets to determine Iran’s political future and regional role? Under the Shah, Washington hoped to answer that question through direct influence, covert power, military integration, and developmental management. After the revolution, it sought to answer it through containment, punishment, isolation, and coercive diplomacy. The methods changed because the historical conditions changed. The principle did not. Iran, meanwhile, insisted—through all its own contradictions, shifts, and internal struggles—that it would not return to the old imperial arrangement. That insistence is what the empire has never forgiven.

So Part VII closes not with reconciliation but with continuity in antagonism. The overthrow of the Shah ended one phase of Iran-U.S. relations, but it did not end the imperial drive to subordinate Iran’s choices to U.S. strategic priorities. The forms became more indirect, more legalistic, more dressed up in the language of international concern. Yet beneath those new forms stood the same old conflict between empire and sovereignty. That is the deeper achievement of Axis of Empire. It allows the reader to see that coups, sanctions, wars, diplomatic crises, and nuclear disputes are not disconnected episodes. They are chapters in one long war over whether Iran belongs to itself or to the map drawn in Washington. And once one sees that, the moral fog begins to lift. The empire was not shocked by Iranian defiance. It was enraged by it. And like all enraged empires, it has spent decades trying to make defiance look like the crime.

The File Empire Wanted Buried

When a book like Axis of Empire reaches its final page, the real test is not whether the author has assembled enough facts to satisfy the archivists. The real test is whether the book leaves the reader more historically armed than before. Afshin Matin-Asgari passes that test. He does not give us a sentimental morality play about two nations who tragically “misunderstood” each other. He gives us something far more useful: a historical anatomy of domination, resistance, adaptation, and unresolved struggle. And that is precisely why this book matters. It tears away the soft imperial fiction that Iran and the United States were once natural friends before some irrational darkness fell in 1979. No. What this history shows, patiently and relentlessly, is that the antagonism did not begin with the revolution. The revolution made visible a contradiction that had been developing for generations. The file empire wanted buried was never really closed. It was just stored under diplomatic language, Cold War jargon, and the polished lies of official memory.

The great strength of Matin-Asgari’s book is that it restores sequence. That may sound modest, but in politics sequence is everything. Once one remembers what happened first, the empire’s moral theater begins to wobble. First came the missionaries and early forms of cultural entry, wrapped in the language of uplift and civilizational concern. Then came oil, war, and the strategic discovery that Iran was too important to be left to its own devices. Then came Mosaddegh’s nationalist attempt to control Iranian resources. Then came the coup. Then came the Shah’s restoration as a client ruler, armed and managed through the machinery of American power. Then came authoritarian modernization, glittering on the surface and rotten underneath. Then came revolution. Then came punishment, war, sanctions, encirclement, and the long effort to discipline a state that refused to behave as a proper subordinate. Once the chronology is restored, so is political clarity. The United States did not stumble into conflict with Iran because Iran became unreasonable. The United States helped create the conditions under which conflict became structurally unavoidable.

This is what liberal commentary can never quite allow itself to say. Liberalism loves history only when history flatters power. It can speak endlessly about “complexity” so long as complexity dissolves responsibility. It can admit mistakes, misjudgments, unfortunate episodes, perhaps even excesses. But it recoils from naming the structure plainly. The problem in Iran was not simply that Washington supported the wrong man or mishandled the revolution at the end. The problem was imperialism itself: the assumption that Iran’s resources, institutions, and strategic location were legitimate objects of external management so long as that management was carried out in the name of order, development, or anti-communism. Once that assumption is named, the entire diplomatic fable begins to look what it always was—a cover story for domination.

Matin-Asgari deserves credit because he does not allow the coup of 1953 to be treated as a stray event floating free from the rest of the narrative. He places it where it belongs: at the center of the modern relationship. And it belongs there because 1953 is the key that unlocks nearly everything that follows. Remove Mosaddegh’s overthrow from the story and 1979 becomes a mystery. Restore it and the revolution becomes legible. Remove the history of CIA intervention, of monarchical restoration, of foreign management over oil and security, and postrevolutionary anti-Americanism appears like some unfortunate cultural excess. Restore that history and it appears as the political memory of a nation that had learned exactly what American friendship meant under conditions of imperial need. The embassy seizure, the slogans, the distrust, the determination never again to become a managed dependency—none of these arose from national madness. They arose from historical experience.

This is also why the book has value beyond Iran. In truth, Axis of Empire is not only about Iran-U.S. relations. It is about the grammar of empire in the modern world. Change the country and some details shift, but the structure remains familiar. A nation in the Global South attempts to assert sovereignty over resources or political direction. Western power first seeks accommodation on imperial terms. If that fails, pressure increases. If nationalist independence threatens profit or strategic control, destabilization follows. A government is branded irresponsible, extremist, communist, terrorist, proliferative, destabilizing, or otherwise unfit for the civilized company of obedient states. Sanctions, covert operations, proxy conflict, diplomatic isolation, and ideological warfare do the rest. Iran’s story therefore belongs in the same historical shelf as Guatemala, Congo, Chile, Indonesia, and so many others. The particulars differ. The imperial reflex does not.

But Iran also represents something more difficult for empire: a case where rupture was not fully reversed. That matters enormously. Many nations have challenged imperial domination. Fewer have managed to sustain state continuity after doing so under sustained pressure. Iran’s post-1979 history is full of contradictions, limits, internal struggles, repressions, and unresolved questions. A serious revolutionary analysis has no reason to hide that. States are not holy. Revolutions do not solve history by declaration. Yet one must distinguish criticism from capitulation. The existence of internal contradiction does not erase the fundamental fact that Iran broke from the U.S.-designed regional order and has remained, despite every siege tactic employed against it, outside full imperial command. That is one reason it remains intolerable to Washington. Empire can forgive many crimes. It rarely forgives successful disobedience.

Here, then, is where a Weaponized Information reading must press beyond summary and into synthesis. What does this book tell us, not only about the past, but about the mechanics of the present? It tells us first that sovereignty in the modern imperial order is always conditional from the standpoint of dominant powers. It is tolerated when subordinate, celebrated when useful, and attacked when exercised in ways that interfere with strategic control. It tells us second that modernization under imperial patronage is not liberation. Roads, universities, military hardware, and industrial growth mean little if the political direction of the society remains externally conditioned and internally policed. It tells us third that anti-imperialist rupture does not emerge from abstract ideology alone. It emerges from lived memory—of humiliation, of coups, of dependency, of wealth stolen under legal cover, of rulers who speak the language of the nation while serving foreign masters. And it tells us finally that empires do not really move on. They mutate their methods, change the vocabulary, shift from covert coups to sanctions and from monarchs to managed regional architectures, but they remain obsessed with restoring hierarchy where it has been broken.

One of the subtler achievements of Matin-Asgari’s book is that it shows how empire is never only military or diplomatic. It is pedagogical. It trains people how to remember badly. It teaches the public to see 1979 without seeing 1953, to see embassy hostages without seeing CIA operatives, to see sanctions as policy rather than siege, to see regional resistance as aggression while treating aircraft carriers as stability. This is why historical work of this kind is politically necessary. It interrupts imperial common sense. It forces sequence back into the story. And once sequence returns, so does accountability. The empire loses one of its favorite advantages, which is the ability to appear shocked by consequences it spent decades preparing.

At the same time, the book also leaves space for the reader to think dialectically about the postrevolutionary state. This is important. A crude reading would simply invert imperial propaganda and flatten everything into heroic certainty. Matin-Asgari does not do that, and neither should we. The Islamic Republic emerged through a genuine anti-imperialist rupture, but it also emerged through struggle among different class forces, political projects, and institutional forms. It was hardened by siege, war, and encirclement. It has had to navigate the contradictions of building sovereignty inside a world system designed to punish independence. Any serious assessment of Iran must therefore hold two truths at once: first, that Iran has been a target of prolonged imperial aggression because it broke from subordination; second, that the internal development of the Iranian state has been shaped by its own contradictions, limits, and contested social character. Historical materialism is not a chapel for saints. It is a method for grasping motion, contradiction, and concrete conditions.

Still, the book’s ultimate weight lies in its demolition of innocence. It demolishes the innocence of early American presence. It demolishes the innocence of Cold War intervention. It demolishes the innocence of development discourse under the Shah. It demolishes the innocence of postrevolutionary U.S. hostility dressed up as international concern. And in so doing, it clears the ground for a more honest political understanding. The antagonism between Iran and the United States is not an argument between equal abstractions. It is the product of a long encounter between an imperial power accustomed to shaping the fate of others and a nation that, through revolution and endurance, refused to remain available for shaping on those terms.

So what is the final verdict on Axis of Empire as a Weaponized Intellects text? It is not a perfect book, nor does it claim to be the last word on Iran, empire, or revolution. But it is a deeply useful one. It gives the reader a durable historical framework. It restores causality where propaganda has imposed confusion. It shows how missionary contact, oil politics, Cold War strategy, covert intervention, client-state construction, revolutionary rupture, war, sanctions, and nuclear confrontation all belong to one continuous historical arc. Above all, it reminds us that empire’s greatest weapon is not only force. It is amnesia. A population that forgets how domination was built will struggle to understand why resistance persists. A population that remembers, however, becomes harder to deceive.

And that is where this review must end. Not with diplomatic balance, not with liberal hand-wringing, and not with the cheap moral equivalence that so often passes for sophistication. It ends with clarity. Iran did not wake up one day and irrationally hate the United States. The United States spent generations inserting itself into Iran’s political life, crushing sovereign development when it threatened imperial priorities, and punishing the country when it refused to return to obedience. The ghost of 1953 still walks because the structure that produced 1953 was never truly dismantled at the imperial center. It simply changed methods. Axis of Empire helps us see that. And once we see it, the present stops looking like chaos and starts looking like history continuing its unfinished argument with power. The empire wanted this file buried. Matin-Asgari opened it again. We would be fools to close it.